One of the Gambit film’s planned directors, Gore Verbinski, has been chatting about why the long-rumoured project never got off the ground.
The long-running Fox X-Men universe certainly had a good innings with 11 films to its name (plus two Deadpools) before the studio’s merger with Disney ended the franchise. One film that never made it to fruition though was Channing Tatum’s long rumoured take on the popular Gambit character. With the movie looking like it was due to arrive towards the tail-end of the X-Men saga’s lifespan, a barnburner of a film could have allowed the franchise to conclude with a greater degree of success (as nobody seems to hold a great deal of love for the series’ final couple of films, we’d argue).
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One of the filmmakers involved, director Gore Verbinski, has been chatting about his experience on the project, seemingly confirming that it was Fox’s rush to put out a film rather than develop the project’s quality that led to hum ultimately settling on a hard pass.
Says Verbinski, “the script we never got to a place where everybody was in agreement. I mean, I got a call from the studio saying ‘we have this project, Gambit, do you want to do it?’ And they had said ‘it shoots right away’. And I said ‘well, I don’t know. Let me, think about it.’ And I forget what was happening. There was something schedule-wise where it was actually going to be maybe a good thing if it happened quickly. Then it was like, the script just didn’t get there. Then I had other stuff that was more important to me, and I think other people had other things. So it was like a short window where if it happened, it was going to happen immediately with a lot of urgency”.
The comment certainly echoes the view of the project’s first director, Rupert Wyatt, who said that 2015’s poor commercial reception to Fox’s other superhero saga, Fantastic Four, effectively sunk his take on the Gambit character, reducing the budget to the point where the script was no longer able to be made without significant rewrites.
Either way, we’ll definitely be seeing the Fantastic Four pop up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe soon, and with the Gambit character largely left unexplored thus far, we wouldn’t be surprised if Marvel includes him in its X-Men launch, whenever that happens.
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