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Channing Tatum's X-Men spin-off Gambit lands director, release date

‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ filmmaker Gore Verbinski is officially onboard

DEREK LAWRENCE@DEREKJLAWRENCE

Channing Tatum’s Gambit has finally been dealt a good hand.

After years of shuffling directors and release dates, Fox announced Thursday that Pirates of the Caribbean filmmaker Gore Verbinski is set to direct the X-Men spin-off, which will be released on Feb. 14, 2019. The date had previously been locked in for an untitled Fox/Marvel release.

Tatum has long been attached to play the New Orleans-based superhero, who was portrayed by Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine.


SAMIR HUSSEIN/WIREIMAGE; MARVEL COMICS

In 2015, the Magic Mike star appeared at Fox’s Comic-Con International panel to tease the standalone film. Yet, the project has struggled to move past the development stage, having lost two directors (Doug Liman and Rupert Wyatt) and its release date.

“We had a first draft; it was good,” shared Tatum in a July update. “But I think that we were coming to sort of the end of that phase of it at a really interesting time, where these movies went through a bit of a paradigm shift, where the X-Men movies and the superhero movies, with Logan and Deadpool — that really broke down a lot of doors for us. So we were trying to do some things that we actually weren’t allowed to do, and they just smashed down the doors, and now we’re kind of giving it a rethink.”