Back in early 2014, X-Men franchise producer Lauren Shuler Donner expressed interest in a Gambit film starring Channing Tatum as the Cajun mutant. It didn’t take long for that interest to evolve into something a little more concrete, with Donner confirming Tatum for the role at the X-Men: Days of Future Past premiere.
Now, Tatum himself has spilled the beans on when we’ll see the standalone Gambit film: October 7, 2016. The news comes via Tatum’s Twitter feed:
How do you say October 7, 2016 in Cajun?
— Channing Tatum (@channingtatum) January 6, 2015
It didn’t take long for the folks over at The Wrap to get a confirmation on that release date, so now it’s official: we’ll see Channing Tatum on the big screen as Gambit on October 7, 2016. This will be the third X-Men-related film dropping in 2016, with Deadpool scheduled for February 16, and Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse hitting theaters on May 27.
Speaking of X-Men: Apocalypse, there continues to be speculation that Tatum will make his debut with a small role in that film, before spinning off into his own solo adventure. Whether or not that’s true is anyone’s guess at this point, but it would certainly make sense to re-introduce the character, if for no other reason than to let audiences know that this is a new take on Gambit, and not the terrible representation from X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Tatum, to his credit, seems excited about the role and ready to invest the time and energy to make it work. Here’s what he had to say about the role earlier this year:
“We really do want to try our hardest to give something fresh. We’re obviously going to go to the saving-the-world superhero movies eventually, but maybe not for the first one. We kind of want to introduce this character in a very different way. When you try to do something different, you never really know right off the bat what that is. We’re feeling our way into it. And we really just gotta prove that concept of that person.”
Stay tuned for more news on Gambit and X-Men: Apocalypse as it becomes available.
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