Years after its cancelation, it’s been revealed that Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie was meant to be a “screwball romantic comedy”
Lizzy Caplan, originally the female lead of a Gambit movie once slated for 2018 before being quietly shelved, told Business Insider that the unmade Marvel movie was in the vein of ’30s romcoms.
“It was a really cool idea. It’s kind of odd that it got scrapped. Those movies don’t seem to ever get scrapped, but it did.”
Caplan added, “We got down the road, we were gonna shoot it. I think there was a start date. I had had meetings with Channing… we had a director, then we didn’t, but I had multiple meetings with Channing and the other producers. They wanted to do, like, a ’30s kind of screwball romantic comedy set in that world, which would have been really fun.”
The Gambit movie, then, feels like the white whale of comic book fans the world over. In the years since, small details have emerged about the project – including Deadpool and Wolverine director Shawn Levy revealing he held talks to helm the feature. Léa Seydoux was also once attached to the project and, in 2022, praised the script’s quality (via IndieWire).
But there might still be cards to play for the Cajun. After his fan favorite appearance in Deadpool and Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds has gone to bat for Channing Tatum’s X-Man.
“I honestly don’t know what goes on behind closed doors in the bookkeeping sessions at Marvel, but I do know that they’re obsessed with him in that role,” Reynolds told Entertainment Weekly.
“It’s kind of like the same situation I went through,” Reynolds remarked last year, referring to his frequent attempts to get Deadpool off the ground, a movement that was jumpstarted by ‘leaked’ test footage in 2014. “Once you show that it works well, that’s really what they need. Sometimes they just need to see it in action.”
For more, check out the new superhero movies coming your way soon and everything we know about the end of Marvel Phase 5.