The development on Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie has been extremely slow. With the loss of two directors (Rupert Wyatt and Doug Liman) and production has pushed back several times.
Many assumed Gambit would be canceled altogether and seems yet again fan speculation is wrong.
Comicbook.com spoke with writer, franchise producer, and possible X-Men director Simon Kinberg on the current state of development concerning Gambit. Kinberg goes on to reveal they hope to start filming Gambit sometime next year.
“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.”
Omega Underground was tipped-off last year about the possibility of Frank Darabont (The Mist, Walking Dead, Shawshank Redemption) rewriting and even directing the film. If the film is in current active development, we haven’t heard of new writers outside of the rumor of Darabont’s involvement.
With Hugh Jackman officially stepping away from the X-Universe with next week’s Logan it does make sense they looking to find more franchise characters alongside new ones like Deadpool, Cable, and possibly X-23.
Also, in the above quote, Kinberg does drop a small tidbit that they have “two or three” X-Men films [going into production] this year. This possibly could confirm the long-rumored X-Men: Supernova aka X-Men: Dark Phoenix alongside the upcoming production of Josh Boone’s New Mutants and Davi Leitch’s Deadpool 2.
Fox is also in active development on both X-Force and Deadpool 3 movies with Joe Carnahan recently rumored to be both writing and directing X-Force.
Also Kinberg could not confirm Dark Phoenix storyline, but smirked when I pressed him on it. #XMen
— ErikDavis (@ErikDavis) February 24, 2017