Channing Tatum’s ‘Gambit’ Movie Would Have Been a Rom-Com?

While Magic Mike disappointingly had no actual magic powers (unless you consider the ability to shirtlessly gyrate to the sounds of Ginuwine a “power”) Channing Tatum almost played a character with legit supernatural abilities: Gambit,  Marvel’s beloved card-throwing mutant. According to a new interview, Tatum was “traumatized” when the project fell through and hasn’t been able to enjoy any Marvel-based entertainment since.

Which isn’t totally surprising, the hypothetical Gambit movie was a big deal when it was first announced in 2014, and it really seemed like it was a thing that was going to exist at some point – so much so that the post-credit sequence in X-Men: Apocalypse was supposed to tee-up Gambit and Tatum actually appeared at Fox’s panel at Comic-Con, complete with a fancy new graphic for the upcoming film. It's a good thing too, if it weren’t for Tatum’s presence, for all we know Stan Lee would have fallen to his death back in 2015. 

The project was passed around by several big-name directors including Gore Verbinski and Doug Liman. Even as the years progressed with no Gambit movie in sight, we still got headlines such as this one, giving us all false hope that we would one day get to see Channing Tatum attempt a Cajun accent while hurling flaming Bicycles at evil-doers:

The movie eventually found its way to Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt, who later claimed that the script had to be overhauled once the studio slashed the budget following the disaster that was 2015’s craptastic Fantastic Four reboot. After Wyatt left, at one point it was even rumored that Tatum was considering directing the film himself. Eventually, though, the film fell victim to the Disney-Fox takeover. 

Screenwriter Simon Kinberg previously described the story as having “​​romantic comedy undercurrents” inspired by classic movie love stories like The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday. Now Tatum has revealed that the film would have been a straight-up “romantic-comedy superhero movie” and ultimately its “thesis” was that “the only thing harder than saving the world is making a relationship work” – which, come to think of it, was also the thesis behind My Super Ex-Girlfriend. 

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Top Image: Sony Pictures/Marvel