Apparently the Failure of FANTASTIC FOUR Is the Reason GAMBIT Didn't Happen with Director Rupert Wyatt
When director Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) was attached to Gambit, the movie was so close to getting made. He and Channing Tatum were only 10 weeks away from shooting the film when Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four was released in theaters.
As you all know, Fantastic Four completely bombed, and because of its failure, Fox needed to make some big changes to the budget for Gambit. The changes that needed to be made were so significant that there just wasn’t enough time to get the work done to make the production schedule, so it fell apart.
In a recent interview with Comics Beat, the director explained:
“I was very close with Channing Tatum and his producing partner Reid Carolin, and I was on the script with him and Josh Zetumer as a writer. We were close, I believe 10 weeks away. It simply came down to budget. There was not enough. 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.”
That’s just part of the way Hollywood works. They’ve been trying to get this film made ever since, and if Channing Tatum gets his way, he may be the one to end up directing it.
According to Wyatt, Tatum “had a really, really wonderful idea for what that film could and should be. I know he and Reid are still plugging away at it, so I hope in the new Disney era, that then they get to make it.” As for what the movie would entail, longtime X-Men producer and writer Simon Kinberg previously described the film as a romantic comedy:
"When you look at Gambit. He’s a hustler and a womanizer and we just felt like there was an attitude, a swagger to him, that lent itself to romantic comedy. Deadpool was an R-rated, raunchy comedy, Logan was a western, Gambit’s gonna be a romantic comedy, and New Mutants is very decidedly a horror film.
"You know, when I say romantic comedy, I use that term loosely, in the same term that I use the term western for Logan loosely. It’s not like they’re gunslingers at high noon in Logan. It’s just a vibe. And I would say the vibe of Gambit has a romantic or sex comedy vibe to it. While it is also still very much a superhero movie with villains and heroes, as all these movies are."
I have no idea of Marvel Studios will push this project forward, but if they do I imagine that it won’t happen anytime soon.
Would you like to see Tatum eventually get to make his Gambit movie?