SDCC 2017: GAMBIT Is Still On; The Delay Could Be Good

Nobody is entirely certain of the status of Gambit, the solo X-Men movie meant to star Channing Tatum, but the actor wants you to know it’s still happening. Why the delay? Well, several reasons. At first, when it was set to release in 2016, there was doubt as to whether Tatum would be on board, and there was even a change in director. That’s never a good sign, but the more recent delay feels different.

According to Tatum, who spoke to Yahoo Movies at that Comics Con thing, it was the success of recent out of the box X-films that opened a lot of creative doors for the project:

“We got really lucky. We had a first draft it was good,” he says, “but we were coming to it at a time at that creative phase of [the X-Men], where these movies went through a bit of a paradigm shift, where the X-Men movies and the superhero movies with Logan and Deadpool really broke down a lot of doors for us. We were trying to do some things that we actually weren’t allowed to do, and they just smashed down the doors, so we’re giving it a bit of a rethink.”

And before you ask the obvious question, the reporter already did. Here’s Tatum’s response:

“We’re not quite going there, because I enjoyed Gambit as a kid so I don’t want to rule out PG-13.”

So there you have it, your much awaited update on Gambit, which doesn’t yet have a release date. You know what? I believe it. I believe there are also other reasons the movie isn’t already underway, but Deadpool and Logan have absolutely paved the way for the likes of New Mutants, reportedly a full-on horror film, to stray from the X-Men franchise’s usual M.O. of being a total snooze-fest. We have X-Men: Dark Phoenix for that.

Now, if only we could get an update on Magic Mike XXXL…