Photo: Marvel Studios
More than five years after the Gambit solo movie was scrapped, attached actor Lizzy Caplan has revealed story details for the Channing Tatum-led X-Men spin-off.
First announced in 2014, the Gambit solo movie would have been part of 20th Century Fox‘s X-Men film series. However, instead of bringing back Taylor Kitsch, who played Gambit in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the studio cast Tatum as the fan-favorite mutant who can mentally create, control, and manipulate pure kinetic energy. While Tatum was reportedly fiercely committed to making Gambit the next big superhero blockbuster, the movie couldn’t make it out of development hell, remaining there until May 2019 when it was canceled due to Disney and Marvel Studios acquiring the rights to the X-Men following the former’s purchase of 20th Century Fox.
What did Lizzy Caplan reveal about Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie?
Caplan, who joined the Gambit cast in November 2017 as its female lead, recently spoke with Business Insider (via Variety) about the shelved X-Men spin-off movie. “It was a really cool idea,” Caplan said. “It’s kind of odd that it got scrapped. Those movies don’t seem to ever get scrapped, but it did.”
The actor then revealed that Gambit would have broken new ground in the X-Men franchise by being a superhero romantic comedy. “We got down the road, we were gonna shoot it. 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,” she continued. “They wanted to do, like, a ’30s kind of screwball romantic comedy set in that world, which would have been really fun.”
When Gambit and the rest of Fox’s X-Men Universe plans were scrapped in 2019, Tatum believed he would never get the chance to portray the mutant on the big screen. However, five years later, Tatum made his debut as Gambit in Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine, appearing alongside Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. While there are no official plans for his return, trusted scooper Alex Perez has hinted that Tatum’s Gambit could appear in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.
The X-Men movies, including Deadpool & Wolverine, are streaming on Disney+.
