Omega Underground recently revealed that Gambit‘s March production start in New Orleans had indeed been scrapped after the exit of director Gore Verbinski.
We’ve now learned that the release date shuffles from February 14th, 2019 to July 7th, 2019 was more than moving out of the way of Sony’s Silver and Black, out on February 8th, 2019. Fox is now planning on delaying the filming start until sometime in the summer.
This is a detail we mentioned in our report about the March start being given the ax and it looks like it’s indeed when the studio intends production to begin.
A start in August could make sense based on the previous production/release schedule for the film. However, we haven’t learned updated production dates outside of the summer start.
We pondered hypothetically if production would move from New Orleans to the franchise’s home base in Montreal. But that doesn’t seem to be the case as NOLA is still set to be the main filming location.
There was also an estimated budget of $155 million making the rounds but that was for an earlier incarnation (Wyatt or Liman’s version), I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if that number has been greatly scaled back.
Gambit is without a director but Channing Tatum remains on as star/producer. This delay will give the studio a bit of time to figure out who’ll direct and make sure everyone on is on the same page before cameras roll.
SOURCE: OMEGA UNDERGROUND