With reports claiming that 20th Century Fox plans to reserve New Mutants, Deadpool 2, and X-Men: Dark Phoniex until NYCC in the fall, it wasn’t all that surprising that the studio selected Kingsman: The Golden Circle to be its headline act during yesterday’s panel at San Diego Comic-Con.
Alas, those pining for any mutant-related announcements were left high and dry, but coming out of The Golden Circle‘s showcase, Yahoo! caught up with Channing Tatum to discuss Gambit and his long-standing commitment to the troubled X-Men spinoff.
Without a director or even a release window to call its own, many feared that Gambit had effectively been placed on ice, but rest assured, it’s still very much alive, with Tatum even going so far as to say that the Powers That Be are actively developing the Remy LeBeau origin movie. Not only that, but thanks to the back-to-back success of Logan and Deadpool, it’s understood that Fox has adopted a new approach to its long-brewing offshoot, after Channing Tatum told Yahoo! that both films “really broke down a lot of doors.”
We got really lucky. We had a first draft it 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. We were trying to do some things that we actually weren’t allowed to do, and they just smashed down the doors, so we’re giving it a bit of a rethink.
But before you begin fantasizing about an R-rated Gambit movie, the actor was quick to point out that a PG-13 rating is still the target…for now.
We’re not quite going there, because I enjoyed Gambit as a kid so I don’t want to rule out PG-13.
Since it was formally announced in 2014, Gambit has lost Rupert Wyatt and Edge of Tomorrow‘s Doug Liman, but there’s still reason to be hopeful – assuming Tatum’s potential commitment to Universal’s Van Helsing reboot doesn’t hamper production, of course.