Channing Tatum has recently spoken about how “traumatized” he was after the Gambit movie was unable to be made. In another report, director Reid Carolin revealed just how close he and Tatum were to making the film.
RELATED: Channing Tatum Was ‘Traumatized’ by Losing Gambit Film
In a recent interview with The Playlist, Carolin — who worked with Tatum on the script of Gambit — said that he and Tatum were just “a few months” away from beginning production on the film when it got shut down thanks to Disney scrapping the film.
“We made this world in New Orleans that was a city of mutants that didn’t care about saving the world,” Carolin said when explaining the general setting of the film. “They went there so they could use their powers to party and hook up, and their hands could fry the grease at MacDonald’s and whatever else and the hardest thing for them to do was to fall in love 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. So, it was all this kind of low-level mutant fights and disagreements and we set in this world of the Mafia—almost kind of like a mutant Goodfellas in New Orleans.”
Both Carolin and Tatum worked on the film for “over five years,” with the pair of them taking nearly two years to get the script ready. According to Carolin, the script is still one of the best things he’s ever read.
“It is still one of my favorite scripts I’ve ever read—I mean I worked on it, so it’s easy to say that,” Carolin explained. “I think it played really well in the Deadpool universe at Fox, Emma Watts had really championed it at Fox,” he continued. “They made Deadpool at Fox and they understood that when you went a little punk rock with these characters you could pop some wheelies and really attract an audience.”
RELATED: Channing Tatum’s Buddy Comedy Film Dog Unveils First Clip
The history of Fox’s attempt to make a Gambit film is a long one, with Tatum and Carolin attached to the project since early 2014. The project had various directors sign on to helm the feature, including Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) at one point. However, things never panned out for the film, and following the merger between Disney and Fox, it seems unlikely that the project will ever be made.
