Channing Tatum’s Canceled Gambit Movie Reveals A Unique X-Men Story
The movei Channing Tatum wanted to make was a bit off the beaten path.
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It seems like we’ve been hearing about Channing Tatum’s cancelled Gambit movie for almost as long as the actor has been able to boast any kind of celebrity status. Now, with the lead up to The Lost City in full gear, and the Magic Mike actor giving interview after interview, the story of the Marvel movie that thought it could but really couldn’t is surfacing once more. But as much as we’ve heard about how badly Tatum wanted to make Gambit, how crushed he was when it all fell through, and how hurt he remains from the experience, we haven’t heard much about the movie itself. Beyond the obvious like, you know — the props department would need to stock up on card decks. But that changed this week when a longtime collaborator with Tatum dished on the unique story they had planned.
Speaking to The Playlist earlier this week, Reid Carolin — who has been writer and/or producer for multiple Channing Tatum productions like Magic Mike, White House Down, and Logan Lucky — talked about the interesting premise behind the Gambit movie. Their film, Carolin said, wouldn’t feature the usual Professor X/Magneto clash of ideologies. Instead, Gambit would show audiences precisely the kind of world that both Xavier and Magneto want: a world where mutants are free to be themselves without hiding. At the same time, it would highlight the unique challenges such a place would create.
According to Carolin, Channing Tatum’s Gambit would have transformed New Orleans into “a city of mutants that didn’t care about saving the world.” Rather than fighting black ops soldiers or the Brotherhood, Carolin said, the mutants of the film would go to the safe haven of New Orleans “so they could use their powers to party and hook up, and their hands could fry the grease at MacDonald’s and whatever else.” Living as nothing more than average civilians, however, would offer unique problems for the city’s mutants. Nothing, Carolin said, would be tougher for the mutants than romantic relationships “because they could read each other’s minds, or when they got into a fight, they could turn a table into a grenade and send their partner to the hospital or whatever.” The producer went on to compare it to “a mutant Goodfellas in New Orleans.
The notion of a showing an environment in which mutants exist freely as mutants and deal with every day problems isn’t completely new. In 2002’s New X-Men #127, a mutant ghetto is established in Alphabet City, Manhattan. Two years later, the critically hailed but sadly short-lived police procedural comic District X premiered with Bishop (played by Omar Sy in X-Men: Days of Future Past) policing the volatile neighborhoods.
But, we’ve never seen something like what Carolin describes on the big screen. It’s a promising concept and one that could benefit the Marvel Cinematic Universe once the movies begin pulling mutants into the narrative. Whenever that does happen, Carolin is hopeful Channing Tatum can be a part of it as Gambit. “I hold out hope that maybe someday it’ll come back—Channing is perfect for the role,” the producer told The Playlist.
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