Edgar Wright Was Offered Channing Tatum's Doomed Gambit Movie – Here's Why He Turned It Down [Exclusive]
It's possible that the 20th Century Fox-financed "X-Men" is the most important superhero movie ever made. There were hit folks-in-spandex flicks prior to Bryan Singer's 2000 blockbuster, but, even with movies like Richard Donner's "Superman" and Tim Burton's "Batman," you could sense a lack of traction. Studios didn't know how to franchise comic book movies back then because the executives didn't read or get comic books.
Singer's film changed this. Stephen Norrington's surprise 1998 hit "Blade" was the Marvel geek aperitif, but "X-Men" was, for Gen-X comic book readers, the realization of a lifelong dream. We never thought we'd get a big-screen adaptation of Marvel Comics' uncanny characters, but the time was right for Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. The advances in computer-generated visual effects allowed Singer to make — on a smallish budget given the film's tentpole ambitions — a vibrant comic book movie that lacked the weightiness of the DC efforts. It was good, sleekly mounted fun.
Singer hung out for the first two "X-Men" movies, but he was lured away in the mid-2000s by Warner Bros., which prized his superhero movie-making mojo, and thought he'd be the man to revive their mothballed Superman franchise (he wasn't). This left 20th Century Fox scrambling to find a replacement director for one of their flagship franchises. Fox briefly righted the ship with Brett Ratner's successful, but, in the classic Ratner fashion, very awful "X-Men: The Last Stand." It was, however, a blockbuster Band-Aid.
After a five-year hiatus, the franchise roared back to life with Matthew Vaughn's "X-Men: First Class." With screenwriter Simon Kinberg pulling double duty as a producer, the mutants were in good hands — and this time around, he was keen to avoid the missteps that briefly shelved the series. This meant thinking outside the box and recruiting talented young directors.
And this is how Edgar Wright almost wound up making an X-Men movie.
The Wright man for the wrong job
In an interview with /Film's Ryan Scott, Kinberg, who is currently attached to produce Wright's in-development adaptation of Stephen King's "The Running Man," revealed that he wanted the filmmaker to get in on the mutant mayhem back in the day. As Kinberg told Scott:
"He's one of my favorite directors of all time and one of my favorite people, just a super great guy. Obviously a cinephile... I've chased Edgar for 'X-Men' movies. I've chased him for literally every possible thing. We have talked about every movie."
Which "X-Men" movie? This would've been in the 2010s, when Bryan Singer returned to the fold for "X-Men: Days of Future Past" and "X-Men: Apocalypse." Was Wright in the running for one of those movies before Singer signed on? Was he up for one of the Wolverine movies that James Mangold wound up helming? Or was it a project that never moved forward?
My curiosity was piqued because I'd never heard Wright was courted to direct a Fox Marvel movie (he was, of course, on board to make "Ant-Man" for the MCU before creative differences compelled him to walk from the project), so I reached out to Wright on the off chance he might want to discuss the topic. To my delight, he did!
A bold, if failed Gambit
Some films just aren't meant to be, and, for various reasons, "Gambit" was one of those movies. It seemed like a no-brainer. Channing Tatum was hot coming off "21 Jump Street," and seemed like a perfect fit to play the carousing New Orleans native. Tatum was also fiercely committed to making it happen on a massive budget with a major director. He reportedly went after Darren Aronofsky, J.C. Chandor, Bennett Miller, and Gareth Evans.
Meanwhile, Kinberg, who was one of the producers on the ill-fated project, hit up Wright, who politely declined the offer. "Gambit wasn't a character I knew too well," Wright told me. "He appeared after my time reading Marvels — roughly 1985 — 1990 or so. [He] wasn't one that I knew a lot about and hadn't really read growing up, so it felt like it was someone else's dream gig. Maybe he means more to people who watched the [animated] show? Which again, was after my time."
I'm in the same camp with Wright. I was entering my junior year of high school when Chris Claremont and Jim Lee introduced Gambit in "The Uncanny X-Men Annual" #14 over the summer of 1990, and had lost interest in Marvel Comics altogether ("The Mutant Massacre" was probably my last hurrah with the characters). I didn't bother to acquaint myself with Gambit until he appeared in 2009's "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," but I did understand the character's rowdy appeal.
I'm glad Wright insisted on making more personal (and wholly original) movies like "The World's End" and "Baby Driver" during that period, but it's a shame that a world-class charisma machine like Tatum didn't get to play such a fun character. It nearly got made with Rupert Wyatt at the helm, which felt like a good match. But now that Disney/Marvel Studios owns Gambit, you can probably forget about a standalone Tatum flick. They'll need to work the ragin' Cajun into the fabric of whatever synergistic bore they're currently planning for the X-Men.