Gambit

It seems that Channing Tatum’s long-developing — and frequently delayed — Gambit movie is finally back in business. After losing two directors and his leading lady, Tatum took the X-Men spinoff back to the drawing board to re-develop the screenplay. With Fox’s X-Men universe quickly expanding following the success of Deadpool, it looks like the studio is ready to give Gambit the green light, and they’re eyeing Lizzy Caplan to join Tatum.

It looks like Gore Verbinski, who was announced a week ago, is here to stay, as the movie will finally hit theaters February 14, 2019. Plenty of time to find a date.

Gore Vebinski has been approached by Fox to direct Channing Tatum’s long-developing X-Men solo outing.

Are you familiar with a ‘sunk cost’ concept? That’s when a business allocates resources to get a project or product off the ground only to see it struggle to deliver; instead of treating that seed money as an expense they’ve written off and will never recover - a ‘sunk cost’ - the company continues to throw good money after bad in a vain hope of eventually recouping its financial losses. You see this happen in Hollywood every now and then, where a studio spends millions of dollars to market a movie it knows is probably going to fail. Or, in the case of a film like Gambit, a studio keeps hiring people to write or rewrite the film despite zero evidence it’ll actually get made.

Although X-Men: Apocalypse and the latest Fantastic Four reboot were fairly notable disappointments for 20th Century Fox, the studio is doing pretty, pretty, prett-ay good in the Marvel department. Thanks to the critical and commercial success of Deadpool and Logan, Fox’s X-universe has been revitalized, and even if the next X-Men movie underperforms, they still have New Mutants, X-Force and Deadpool 2 on the way — and it looks as though that may be the tip of the iceberg.

Fox’s Gambit movie seems perpetually stuck in development hell, occasionally offering hope in fits and starts as directors and actors sign on and then leave for greener pastures before production ever gets underway. Channing Tatum is still on board, but the film, once again lacks a director. Doug Liman, who took over the project for some time after Rupert Wyatt left, recently explained exactly why he decided Gambit wasn’t for him.

News of Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie has become redundant, what with all the times it was allegedly going to “begin filming early next year.” Today, X-Men series producer and writer Simon Kinberg offers another update on the delayed spinoff, assuring fans that it’s still very much in development and they have every intention of hopefully, maybe, possibly filming it next year — but hey, ask again in six months and we’ll see what’s up then.

When you hear talk of the standalone Gambit movie, most — well, pretty much all — of it has the word “delay” in there somewhere. The movie started off strong: Channing Tatum signed on for the title character, it had a director, and everything looked good. Then, the first delay happened, it lost director Rupert Wyatt, got a new one, and was delayed some more. But fans of the trickster need not lose hope yet: X-Men producer Laura Schuler Donner says Tatum is still signed on to do a standalone Gambit movie in the future. We just don’t know when.

The future was looking bright for the X-Men franchise after Bryan Singer revived it with First Class, but after this summer’s Apocalypse, it’ll take a lot to get the mutants back on their feet. The upcoming Wolverine solo joint Logan will see Hugh Jackman comb his hair into ears for one last ride, but after that it’s anyone’s game. Today, we hear there’s a new X-Men movie shooting sometime next spring, but which one is it?

It may be difficult to believe in light of the 2016 election results, but there is other news still happening out there — even in the world of film, which offers a welcome distraction for many right now. And 20th Century Fox is serving up some pretty major news today, with a report that sheds light on the studio’s plans for the future of their expanding X-Men franchise, including Deadpool 3, X-Force and Gambit.