There was a time when Gambit had a release date of October 7, 2016. But the movie lost more than one director, and as a result, filming still hasn't begun. And now, Simon Kinberg has announced that 20th Century Fox won’t begin shooting until 2018.
Kinberg, a writer and producer for almost every recent X-Men movie, told Comic Book that Gambit is still in active development. But, as they have multiple other projects in hand, they’re not rushing into the project. Of course, we already knew that X-Men 7, The New Mutants and Deadpool 2 will all start filming within the next few months.
While Gambit may not have a director at the moment, the good news is that Channing Tatum, who bagged the titular role way back in October 2014, is still committed to playing the superhero. According to Kinberg:
It’s in active development. It’s a movie that we hope will be ready to go by the end of this year and shoot next year. We have two or three X-Men related movies this year so it can wait for a moment. The process has been that Channing [Tatum] is as determined about getting the character right as Ryan Reynolds was about Deadpool and Hugh [Jackman] was about this Logan movie. We know that when we get those right, the movie succeeds, so we want to make sure we get Gambit right because we want him to be the beginning of a whole new franchise.
Gambit fans might be a little upset about the endless delays, but they should also be glad that Tatum is still with the project. The last thing we want is for Fox to hastily come up with a messy movie as they did with Josh Trank's Fantastic Four. Nothing is better than something in such cases!
