2016 is a crowded and incredibly exciting year for superhero movies, but one release which is flying somewhat under the radar is Gambit, an X-Men spinoff starring Channing Tatum. The actor landed the role after making it clear in interviews how interested in the Cajun character he is, and Fox are currently in the process of hunting for a director. So, just how excited is the actor about the movie?
"I love Gambit," Tatum says in the latest issue of Empire Magazine. "I grew up in the South; my father's from Loiuisiana. We'd go to New Orleans and I heard all the dialects. It felt so different from the rest of America; it has its own ancient culture. So I identified with that. And he always felt the most real of the X-Men to me. He's kind of a tortured soul and he's not a good guy. But he's not a bad guy, either. He walks his own path. And of course he plays cards and drinks and is a martial-arts badass!" It sounds like the movie is going to be pretty faithful to the comic books then, but that's not a huge surprise what with X-Men scribe Chris Claremont writing its treatment.
As for the current status of Gambit, the actor added: "Josh Zetumer just turned in the first draft of the script, and it's killer. None of us were sure how he was going to deal with the X-Men world. But we're going to be changing some of the tropes of these movies. It's always about saving the world (Laughs), but maybe we're going to shift things a liittle but. There's so many ways you can take [an origin story]. You could do it like Batman Begins, or a different take and go the Guardians of the Galaxy route. All I can say is, I'm super excited." The chances of Gambit showing up in X-Men: Apocalypse remains to be seen, but this movie sounds like it could be a sleeper hit!