Channing Tatum‘s axed Gambit movie was a “screwball romantic comedy,” Lizzy Caplan recently revealed to Business Insider. Variety reported in November 2017 that Caplan had boarded Tatum’s long-in-the-works passion project as the female lead, although details were scarce at the time. Tatum tried for years to get a Gambit movie off the ground. The project was effectively killed when Disney’s purchase of Fox was completed in 2019.
“It was a really cool idea,” Caplan said of Tatum’s canceled Gambit movie. “It’s kind of odd that it got scrapped. Those movies don’t seem to ever get scrapped, but it did.”
“We got down the road, we were gonna shoot it,” she continued. “I think there was a start date. I had had meetings with Channing, and there were a couple different… we had a director, then we didn’t, but I had multiple meetings with Channing and the other producers. They wanted to do, like, a ’30s kind of screwball romantic comedy set in that world, which would have been really fun.”
Tatum told Variety in 2022 that he ended up “traumatized” after spending years trying to make a Gambit movie only for the project to be axed, adding: “I shut off my Marvel machine. I haven’t been able to see any of the movies. I loved that character. It was just too sad. It was like losing a friend because I was so ready to play him.”
As Marvel fans know by now, Tatum finally got the chance to play Gambit on the big screen thanks to his surprise role in last year’s Marvel blockbuster “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Comic book movie fans largely agreed that Tatum’s Gambit was one of the best parts of the movie. Tatum took to social media amid the film’s release to share an emotional statement on finally getting the chance to play Gambit.
“I thought I had lost Gambit forever. But [Reynolds] fought for me and Gambit,” he wrote at the time. “I will owe him probably forever. Cause I’m not sure how I could ever do something that would be equal to what this has meant to me. I love ya buddy…I’m so grateful to be in this movie. It’s a masterpiece in my opinion. And just pure bad ass joy. I was literally screaming in the theater.”
Tatum’s appearance as Gambit in “Deadpool & Wolverine” left fans clamoring for a standalone Gambit movie. The actor responded to the fan demand in an interview with Variety, saying: “I’ve been saying I want it for the last 10 years. It’s in Bob Iger and Kevin Feige’s hands. I pray to God.”
Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds went on to tell Entertainment Weekly that Marvel executives are quite high on Tatum, but whether that means a Gambit movie will get made is not known.
“I honestly don’t know what goes on behind closed doors in the bookkeeping sessions at Marvel, but I do know that they’re obsessed with him in that role,” Reynolds said. “It’s kind of like the same situation I went through. Once you show that it works well, that’s really what they need. Sometimes they just need to see it in action.”
