Fantastic Four Failure Nixed Gambit at Fox

The studio got cold feet after Fantastic Four tanked, and cut the Gambit budget just weeks before production was due to start.

In news we can easily file under “hmm, that makes sense” former Gambit solo movie director Rupert Wyatt has confirmed that we were about a playing card’s width away from getting a cinematic adventure with the kinetic mutant back in 2015, until Fox saw the box office numbers rolling in from Josh Trank’s heavily edited Fantastic Four.

The Gambit film was – and still is – set to star Channing Tatum as Remy LeBeau, who has enjoyed an on again-off again relationship with the X-Men over the years in the Marvel comics. Wyatt’s tenure as the man in charge of bringing the standalone movie to the screen in 2015 ended in disappointment for everyone involved, as he’s revealed in a new interview with Comics Beat.

“I was very close with Channing Tatum and his producing partner Reid Carolin, and I was on the script with him and Josh Zetumer as a writer,” the director said in the midst of promoting his new film, Captive State. “We were close, I believe 10 weeks away. It simply came down to budget. There was not enough. You know all too well about the politics of the business. Fantastic Four had been released by Fox a month before and had not gone well for them, so our budget was slashed quite considerably. The inevitable, from my perspective was, ‘Well then we need to rewrite the script to tailor to our budget,’ but we were too close to a start date for Fox to really want to go there, so unfortunately, it just didn’t work out.”

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Wyatt doesn’t think the Gambit movie will ever really die, as long as Tatum stays the course in his determination to get it made. “All I know is Channing had a really, really wonderful idea for what that film could and should be. I know he and Reid are still plugging away at it, so I hope in the new Disney era, that then they get to make it.”

Fantastic Four director Trank went through hell at Fox when he attempted to craft a grittier new outing for Marvel’s First Family at the studio, an experience he has alluded to a few times over the years, most recently during the release of Captain Marvel this month. After Joseph Kahn tweeted “No superhero movie fails” Trank responded with “hold my beer.”