At this point, I’m intensely skeptical that Gambit is ever going to make it into theaters. It feels like I’ve been writing about various permutations of the film for years, as it cycles through directors and its release date keeps getting pushed back further and further. But last Friday, 20th Century Fox announced that it’s finally going to hit cinemas on March 13th, 2020. And while that’s great to hear, let’s just say I’ll believe it when I see it.
Anyway, if this incarnation of the movie does actually begin shooting, producer Simon Kinberg has explained that it’s going to be quite different from the heist film it’d been billed as. In an interview with Collider, here’s what he shared:
“It still has elements of a heist movie. It has elements of a romantic comedy and elements of a heist movie because he is a thief, but it is a love story between him and Bella.”
Their theory is apparently that they can position Gambit as a different kind of superhero movie, with Kinberg explaining:
There are elements that are similar, but it is different in tone, almost in sub-genre—one of the things that we’ve done with these standalone movies is that we’ve tried to create sort of sub-genres within the superhero genre when it comes to these standalone movies; even Deadpool itself is like a raunchy R-rated comedy, not just a superhero film.
With Channing Tatum’s Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL proving to be huge hits with female audiences worldwide, Fox might be trying to pitch Gambit to them as a romance as opposed to your typical action movie. I guess they’ve tried almost everything else to get this one in gear, so hell, why not make it a romantic comedy? What’s the harm, right?
One major thing standing in the way of the project is that with the Disney acquisition of the Fox superhero IP set to be finalized sometime next summer (or perhaps sooner), there’s going to have to be a cutoff point where Fox will have to stop developing X-Men related projects. I suspect that Gambit‘s running pretty damn close to that deadline, so this latest version of the film might just be the last roll of the dice.
