Gore Verbinski reveals why directing Gambit for Fox didn’t happen

Director Gore Verbinski explains why directing Fox’s ill-fated Gambit movie fell through and why the film was eventually canceled.

Of all the failed installments in Fox’s extinct X-Men franchise, Gambit had to be the most hectic. The planned Marvel flick had its star in Channing Tatum but passed through several directors for years, including Doug Liman and Rupert Wyatt, before it wound up in the hands of The Ring and Pirates of the Caribbean helmer Gore Verbinski.

His involvement came late in the game, around October of 2017, with reported talks that didn’t last very long. By January the following year, he was out and he detailed why it all went bust in a recent interview with Collider, starting with when he got the call.

Why Gore Verbinski didn’t direct Gambit

At the time the studio reached out to Verbinski they didn’t have a complete script, he recalled, which was a problem and it “never got to a place where everybody was in agreement.”

Nonetheless, he revealed that they still contacted him for talks, commenting:

"“I mean, I got a call from the studio saying, ‘We have this project, ‘Gambit’, do you want to do it?’ And they had said, ‘It shoots right away.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. Let me, think about it.’ And I forget what was happening. There was something schedule-wise where it was actually going to be maybe a good thing if it happened quickly. Then it was like, the script just didn’t get there. Then I had other stuff that was more important to me, and I think other people had other things. So it was like a short window where if it happened, it was going to happen immediately with a lot of urgency.”"

In the end, the discussions were to gauge interest and Verbinski shrugged them off as nothing remarkable. He stated that he and other filmmakers routinely get offers in the average year that don’t go anywhere:

"“It’s a weird one because for whatever reason, it ended up in the press. But I mean, there’s six of those a year. Where you meet with somebody, you talk about this, you say, ‘Yeah, well, if we can get the script right,’ and nobody ever hears about them.”"

Gambit was pitched as a “sexy” heist thriller according to producer and Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg. He would later disclose the film was supposed to tie up loose ends from X-Men: Apocalypse pertaining to Nathaniel Essex, aka Mr. Sinister, who never made a formal debut.

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They would approach Lea Seydoux (Spectre) and Lizzy Caplan (Cloverfield) about being in it, but development had devolved to the point where the tone was reportedly being reimagined as akin to a romantic comedy, and Tatum was offering to direct the movie himself.

Gambit was mercifully canceled in May 2019 as Disney’s acquisition of Fox was being finalized. The X-Men are now back with Marvel and with the announcement of The Mutants, they may decide to give the Cajun thief another try.

Would you have liked to see Gambit on the big screen? How about if Marvel resurrects those plans with Channing Tatum or somebody else? Sound of below.