Channing Tatum offers Gambit movie update: 'We're kind of giving it a rethink'

Back in 2015, Channing Tatum appeared during the 20th Century Fox panel at Comic-Con International to help launch a standalone Gambit movie with Tatum as the title star. Two years later, Gambit remains just out of reach — director Doug Liman left the project in 2016 — but Tatum remains optimistic.

“We had a first draft; it was good,” Tatum told Yahoo! in an interview at Comic-Con on Thursday. “But I think that we were coming to sort of the end of that phase of it at a really interesting time, where these movies went through a bit of a paradigm shift, where the X-Men movies and the superhero movies, with Logan and Deadpool — that really broke down a lot of doors for us. So we were trying to do some things that we actually weren’t allowed to do, and they just smashed down the doors, and now we’re kind of giving it a rethink.”

But asked if that meant Gambit could be R-rated, like those two X-Men films he mentioned, Tatum wouldn’t commit. “No, I don’t know yet,” he said. “We’re not quite going there because I enjoyed Gambit as a kid so I don’t want to rule out PG-13. But some of the stuff we want to do is a little bit R, but we’re not sure if it merits a full R yet.”

In a separate interview with MTV, Tatum cited Logan and Deadpool as inspiration and said working on Gambit had been an interesting challenge. “It’s fun, it’s good, it’s like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube that’s always moving,” he said. “These things, they’re hard, they’re tough.”

Tatum will next be seen in Logan Lucky, out next month; the star is at Comic-Con to promote Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which arrives in September.