While Twentieth Century Fox has gotten rather aggressive with their plans for movies based on the X-Men comic book franchise, there has been one long in development project that we haven’t heard much about – the Gambit solo movie starring Channing Tatum.
The project has had a troubled time getting to the big screen with various directors and writers coming on board and then dropping off. But the latest delay isn’t so much caused by the departure of a creative than it is the creative team gaining a bit of freedom in how they will tell their story.
As Channing explained to Yahoo this weekend, the script is currently being rewritten to allow them to better tell the story they want to tell. And that story just may lie in territory that is just beyond the traditional PG-13 rating that most comic book films receive.
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, and now we’re giving it a bit of a rethink.
Of course, this comes as Tatum is starting to show up in the advertising materials for Kingsman: The Golden Circle, another comic book-to-film franchise that does not fear to tread in R-rated material.
Tatum does point out that they are not necessarily aiming for an R-rating, just that they are looking to have more of a latitude to possibly go there if needed.
We’re not quite going there because I enjoyed Gambit as a kid, so I don’t want to rule out PG-13. 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.
And while I have never been much of a fan of the Gambit character, Tatum’s remarks have me more interested in the film now. It is great to see that the success of films like Deadpool and Logan are having a positive effect for other filmmakers. Those two films are very different in terms of storytelling and tone, but they do share one thing in common – they have singular storytelling visions that suits the characters and source material they are drawing from. If that is the same thing that Tatum and his collaborators on the project – And right now that appears to be just producers Simon Kinberg and Lauren Shuler Donner, though Frank Darabont has been rumored to be rewriting with an eye towards directing – are doing then more power to them.
