Given that it had a pre-assigned release date set for next year, 20th Century Fox’s latest stab at bringing X-Men hero Gambit to the screen needed to start moving quickly. With Channing Tatum long since attached in the lead, the film has now zeroed in on a director with The Gambler’s Rupert Wyatt on board.
Wyatt, who has a little bit of experience marshalling spectacle and special effects thanks to his work on Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, is the man Fox feels can best handle the story of the New Orleans mutant gambler and rogue (small “r”, although he has a long and slightly creepy romantic history with Rogue herself) who can throw playing cards as weapons as he generates and manipulates kinetic energy.
Josh Zetumer has written the script for the stand-alone adventure, though there’s a chance Gambit may turn up in X-Men: Apocalypse, even if it’s just in a post-credit sequence. Which we’d like to see, if only for Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool to show up and complain that he didn’t get a shot at such a sequence. Gambit is set to arrive in cinemas both here and Stateside on October 7 next year.