Channing Tatum Was So ‘Traumatized’ by Not Playing Gambit That He Can’t Watch Marvel Movies: ‘It Was Just Too Sad’

variety.com:

Ramin Setoodeh Executive EditorIn this week’s Variety cover story, Channing Tatum talks about the road to co-directing his first movie, “Dog,” with his longtime producer partner Reid Carolin.But before he came up with the idea for the MGM indie (which opens on Feb.

18), Tatum and Carolin spent four years developing “Gambit,” a raunchy stand-alone movie based on the “X-Men” mutant.The superhero project was set up at Twentieth Century Fox in 2016, and Tatum and Carolin had lobbied to share the director’s chair. “The studio really didn’t want us to direct it,” Tatum says. “They wanted anybody but us, essentially, because we had never directed anything.”Tatum was so in love with the script that he’d written with Carolin that he was open to letting go of directing.

Speaking about it now, Tatum still defends the character as if he were a real person. “They would call him ‘flamboyant’ in his description,” Tatum says. “I wouldn’t — he was just the coolest person.

He could pull anything off. Most superheroes, their outfits are utilitarian. Batman’s got his belt. Gambit’s like, ‘No, this shit’s just fly, bro!