Disney To Evaluate ‘X-Men’ Spinoff ‘Gambit’
Fox has planned several X-Men spin-offs, including the long rumoured Channing Tatum- starrer Gambit. This project is now being reevaluated by Disney, as per the franchise producer and writer, and also Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg.
Gambit To Be Evaluated By Disney Post Merger
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“All of the movies at Fox are being evaluated,” Kinberg told Variety. “I love the idea of Channing playing Gambit. I think we have a great script for it and I think it’s a role he was born to play. It’s a character I grew up loving and I know the fans love. So I suspect, I hope it will happen.” The formally Fox-controlled characters, especially Deadpool, will be folded under the Marvel Studios banner, allowing mutants as well as characters like the Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer opportunities to crossover with the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Gambit has seen many directors helming the project so far, including Rise of Planets of Apes’ Rupert Wyatt and then to Pirates of the Carribean’s Gore Verbinski. There were several rumours that Channing Tatum will himself step in as the director, making his directorial debut with Gambit.
Gambit Will Be A Romantic-Comedy
Wyatt also said that Gambit was cancelled after Fantastic Four reboot turned out to be a massive failure at the box office.
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“I would say probably either somebody from Wakanda or Iron Man. I mean I love Robert, I’ve worked with him,” he said. “I love what he does with that character. I feel like he created the tonal template for the MCU with the first Iron Man movie. And so the notion of Iron Man popping up in X-Men or Iron Man interacting with Deadpool is pretty exciting.”
Simon Kinberg has revealed X- Men spin- off Gambit as a romantic comedy, which is inspired by the womanizer personality of Gambit.
“We were close, I believe 10 weeks away. It simply came down to budget. There was not enough,” Wyatt told Comics Beat of the delay that forced him to exit the project.
“You know all too well about the politics of the business. Fantastic Four had been released by Fox a month before and had not gone well for them, so our budget was slashed quite considerably. The inevitable, from my perspective was, ‘Well then we need to rewrite the script to tailor to our budget,’ but we were too close to a start date for Fox to really want to go there, so unfortunately, it just didn’t work out.”
There were a few more X-Verse spinoffs in works for Fox when the Disney-Fox acquisition deal took place. These are Multiple Man starring James Franco and another secret project written by Brian Bendis, which is speculated to be a Kitty Pryde film.
X-Men Dark Phoenix will be out on June 7.
