Why Channing Tatum’s Gambit Movie Died Before His Deadpool & Wolverine Cameo

Spoilers for “Deadpool & Wolverine” follow.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” is finally upon us (you can read our review right here), and like most Marvel Cinematic Universe movies these days, it’s loaded with fun, surprising cameos. Some of these cameos have been long-rumored leading up to the release of the movie, and others are big surprises. Midway through the film, a large number of guest stars show up to team up with Deadpool and Wolverine. 

They include Elektra (Jennifer Garner), Blade (Wesley Snipes), X-23 (Dafne Keen), and Gambit (Channing Tatum). Elektra, Blade, and X-23 are all characters returning from previous movies, with the actors who originally played them reprising their roles. But Gambit is a bit of a wild card. While Gambit appeared in the dreadful movie “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” the character was portrayed by Taylor Kitsch in that movie, not Tatum. But as it turns out, Tatum came very, very close to playing Gambit in his own movie. 

Alas, like many other titles announced during the superhero movie boom, “Gambit” never made it to the big screen — but not for lack of trying. “Deadpool & Wolverine” gives Tatum a chance to finally play the character he hoped to play for years, but some audience members might not even realize that a Tatum-starring Gambit movie was ever in the works. Here’s what happened.

Created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Jim Lee, Gambit first appeared in the pages of the comic “The Uncanny X-Men Annual.” The character gained further popularity when he showed up on “X-Men: The Animated Series.” A Cajun from New Orleans, Gambit has the power to super-charge objects with kinetic energy. He tends to use playing cards for this — charging the cards up with explosive energy and launching them at enemies. It was only a matter of time before Gambit made the leap to the big screen, and that happened in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” where Taylor Kitsch played the character. 

As it turns out, Kitsch wasn’t the first choice for the role. Instead, Channing Tatum was circling the part, but Kitsch was ultimately cast because Tatum’s schedule was busy (he was filming the 2009 flick “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra”). However, the role of Gambit never left Tatum’s mind. In 2013, Tatum let it be known that he would very much like to play the part, saying: “I would like to play Gambit. Gambit’s my favorite. I’m from New Orleans, around that area. My dad’s from New Orleans, and I like to do a Cajun accent. I could do it for real.” 

As luck would have it, Fox was in the process of planning their own “Gambit” spin-off movie, and by 2015, Tatum was officially signed on to play the part in a standalone film. 

Unfortunately, it would not be smooth sailing for the “Gambit” movie. As the title was developed, various directors signed up or were at least considered for the project, including Rupert Wyatt, Doug Liman, Gore Verbinski, and even Edgar Wright. Despite this ever-changing list of filmmakers, Tatum stuck with the movie, and it continued to change shape from year to year. By 2017, after the success of both “Logan” and “Deadpool,” the movie was in the process of being reworked from scratch. “We had a first draft [that] was good, but we were coming to at a time at that creative phase of [the X-Men], where these movies went through a bit of a paradigm shift, where the X-Men movies and the superhero movies with Logan and Deadpool really broke down a lot of doors for us,” Tatum said at the time. “We were trying to do some things that we actually weren’t allowed to do, and they just smashed down the doors, and now we’re giving it a bit of a rethink.” 

And what would the new direction for the movie be? As it turns out, one of the plans was to make “Gambit” something akin to a romantic comedy. However, this might’ve contributed to the project’s ultimate downfall. At one point, Léa Seydoux had been cast in the film, and she later confirmed that behind-the-scenes there was a push to make the film more comedic, saying, “The script was really good. It had some funny bits in it, but they wanted to make more of a comedy.”

Fox kept shuffling the movie around from release date to release date, with seemingly no end in sight. And still, Tatum stuck with the movie. He really wanted to play Gambit. And after one director after another left the project, Tatum finally suggested that he should direct the movie himself, alongside his producing partner Reid Carolin. Sadly, the “Gambit” movie was doomed. 

In 2017, it was revealed that Disney was buying Fox. The deal was completed in 2019, and at that point, the future of Fox’s Marvel-related titles was in question. In February of 2019, word broke that Fox’s Marvel titles in development were “on hold.” Finally, by May of 2019, it was official: “Gambit” was dead. Tatum did not take the news well. “Once ‘Gambit’ went away, I was so traumatized,” Tatum told Variety. “I shut off my Marvel machine. I haven’t been able to see any of the movies. I loved that character. It was just too sad. It was like losing a friend because I was so ready to play him.” 

In that same interview, Tatum reaffirmed that he would still love to play the character, but it genuinely seemed like he would never get the chance.

Thankfully for Tatum, “Deadpool & Wolverine” changes that. The actor finally gets to play Gambit on the big screen, albeit in a kind of comic relief fashion (the movie has a lot of fun at the expense of the Cajun accent Tatum uses). Would Tatum’s stand-alone “Gambit” movie have been any good? We can never know for sure, but at least the actor finally got the chance to play the part he’d been hoping to play for years.