It was announced in 2014 that Gambit would be the next X-Men character to receive a solo movie, and that the movie would star Channing Tatum. A release date was set for 2016, but 2016 came and went, and we still have no Gambit movie.
Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) was the first director to drop the project, referencing scheduling conflicts. Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow) was quickly hired, but later cited a lack of personal connection with the character, and left to pursue other projects (Gambit's delay may have also played a part in his departure).
In 2016, Gambit was supposed to appear in X-Men: Apocalypse, but Channing Tatum was nowhere to be seen when the movie was released.
Is there any hope that this movie will ever be made?
Simon Kinberg recently said that there’s still passion for this project and that it’s likely to begin shooting sometime in 2018. And, according to Tatum, the creative team is working on the movie at this very moment:
Yeah, of course. We're working on it right now.
If so, why the delay? Maybe it’s because 20th Century Fox already has a full slate of X-Men movies waiting to be released next year.
During an interview with Cinema Blend, Tatum referred to the delay as a blessing, especially since Deadpool and Logan have opened new doors for the shared universe:
I think we got super, super lucky. I think a lot of setbacks, we'll look at them in hindsight as giant blessings. Because we were making it, [and] we're writing a movie right at the turn of a paradigm shift in movies. So we got lucky that we didn't just come out with ours, which I don't think was fully formed. It was a good idea. We were going in the right direction. And then we got to learn from two really beautifully different kinds of complete paradigm shifts"¦like Logan and Deadpool, I mean, they knocked down a lot of doors for us to be able to do things that we wanted to do in the first place.
