Yes, Channing Tatum is still planning to make that Gambit movie. He just needs a finished screenplay. And a director. And an angle that helps us forget that Gambit is one of the lamest X-Men to ever achieve inexplicable popularity. Casting the intensely likable and charismatic Tatum goes a long away toward achieving that last goal and in a new interview, the Magic Mike and 21 Jump Street star revealed that the first draft of the script has been turned in ... and that the movie will be an origin story, albeit one that won’t play by the normal superhero movie rules.

Speaking with Empire (via SlashFilm), Tatum seemed aware of just how much everyone is over origin stories when he confirmed that Gambit will be an origin story:

Josh Zetumer just turned in the first draft of the script, and it’s killer. None of us were sure how he was going to deal with the X-Men world. But we’re going to be changing some of the tropes of these movies. It’s always about saving the world, but maybe we’re going to shift things a little bit. There’s so many ways you can take [an origin story]. You could do it like Batman Begins, or a different take and go the Guardians of the Galaxy route. All I can say is, I’m super excited.

Truth be told, Tatum could literally say anything right now and we’d have to buy it because we don’t know anything about the movie.This is all BS until we hear otherwise, so the only thing we can do is to comment on how refreshing it could be to see an origin story that is unshackled from the template that we’ve seen a dozen times before.

In the same interview, Tatum also once again reminded us that he’s taking the character’s Cajun background seriously, which means that we’ll get to see him put his best N’awlins on:

I grew up in the South; my father's from Louisiana. We'd go to New Orleans and I heard all the dialects. It felt so different from the rest of America; it has its own ancient culture. So I identified with that. [Gambit] always felt the most real of the X-Men to me. He's kind of a tortured soul and he's not a good guy. But he's not a bad guy, either. He walks his own path. And of course he plays cards and drinks and is a martial-arts badass!

Our interest level in a Gambit movie hovers somewhere around meh, but our interest in a movie where Channing Tatum plays a drunk, gambling Cajun is currently sitting at eyebrow slightly raised. In any case, there’s no way this movie can be worse than X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which also also featured Gambit (played by a totally lost Taylor Kitsch). Then again, that’s not a very high bar to clear.

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