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It’s no secret that Channing Tatum had worked hard to make a standalone Gambit movie happen while Fox controlled the X-Men movie rights, only for the deal to fall apart at the last moment — but the Magic Mike star, who finally got to play the character in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, is grateful that it didn’t happen when he looks back now.

“The universe just saved us,” Tatum told Variety about the fact that the proposed Gambit movie, adding, “We would have failed so hard.”

While that kind of failure is by no means guaranteed, it’s worth noting that what we know about the project — which got cancelled when 20th Century Fox was sold to Disney in 2019 —  does at least make it sound as if the movie was going to be a pretty big outlier in terms of superhero movies. The feature was set to co-star Lizzy Caplan, who described the movie as “a ‘30s kind of screwball romantic comedy.” If nothing else, it would have been… different…?

Of course, it’s worth remembering that Fox was pretty bold when it came to X-Men movie projects, compared with other superhero movie studios: can you really imagine Marvel Studios having greenlit the first Deadpool, for example…?

Channing Tatum will appear on our screens next in Roofman, in theaters October 10. He’ll return as Gambit in Avengers: Doomsday, in theaters December 18, 2026.

Want more? Make sure you've read our list of all the best Marvel Comics stories of all time, and get ready for all the free Marvel comics coming as part of this year's Free Comic Book Day / Comics Giveaway Day events.