With casting rumors still going around on a regular basis, it's clear 20th Century Fox hasn't given up on their Gambit X-Men spinoff with Channing Tatum. This despite a sluggish production that has seen two directors jet the project, first Rupert Wyatt and most recently Doug Liman, with no clear start date in sight. But that could be about to change, because Deadline reports Pirates of the Caribbean's Gore Verbinski is in very early talks to direct.
This would probably be a good move for Verbinski, who is coming off the expensive (and underrated) horror flop, A Cure for Wellness. He took a lot of heat in 2013 for The Lone Ranger, which turned out to be a costly and very public disaster for Disney. But he made them a ton of money on three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, so he's never really paid the price for his failures. He also directed the excellent animated western, Rango.
Gambit would almost certainly be a hit. The X-Men's resident Cajun and thief has the ability to manipulate kinetic energy, using this power to charge inanimate objects, usually playing cards, into explosive weapons. At one time he was the most popular X-Man, even more so than Wolverine, and a successful movie could catapult him back into that spot.
