A few years ago, if I told you Channing Tatum was at San Diego Comic-Con promoting a movie, you might have guessed it was his adaptation of Gambit, the Marvel superhero who is part of the X-Men universe. However, while Tatum is in San Diego today, he's promoting a different movie of which he is a part: the upcoming sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle. We had the opportunity to catch up with Tatum, and when we asked him about when he'd ever bring Gambit to SDCC, he explained why he thinks the movie's delay will work in the movie's favor. Tatum explained:
I think we got super, super lucky. I think a lot of setbacks, we'll look at them in hindsight as giant blessings. Because we were making it, [and] we're writing a movie right at the turn of a paradigm shift in movies. So we got lucky that we didn't just come out with ours, which I don't think was fully formed. It was a good idea. We were going in the right direction. And then we got to learn from two really beautifully different kinds of a complete paradigm shifts... like Logan and Deadpool, I mean, they knocked down a lot of doors for us to be able to do things that we wanted to do in the first place.
Channing Tatum brings up an excellent point. Had the Gambit movie been rushed into production several years ago, when the movie was trading directors and zipping through screenplay drafts, then it would have been caught in the weird X-limbo that could have put it more in line with failed X-Men spinoffs, like The Wolverine. Efforts to spin out mutant characters from the X-Men universe weren't necessarily successful, until both Logan and Deadpool proved that you could -- and should -- take different avenues with superhero genre movies and find an audience... so long as it speaks to the fans of the characters.
Tatum went on to say that the Gambit movie could really benefit from the current "rebirth" that's happening in the X-universe, with Deadpool building his own cinematic mythology, and the X-Men finding their way in the world without Wolverine. Next year alone, FOX will unveil the New Mutants, while X-Men: Dark Phoenix will sandwich Deadpool 2. Channing Tatum told CinemaBlend that he "hopes to God" that Gambit can bring a panel to San Diego Comic-Con next year. We shall see.
Check out a part of our conversation with Channing Tatum:
You can catch Channing Tatum as Agent Tequila in Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Golden Circle when it opens in theaters on September 22. And for a complete rundown of movies opening in theaters in 2017, head over here.
