Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie never came to fruition due to the Disney/20th Century Fox merger, but the actor’s dream of playing Marvel’s Ragin’ Cajun finally came true last year. Deadpool & Wolverine featured Remy LeBeau as one of the superheroes the title protagonists teamed up with in The Void, and Tatum will reprise the character in Avengers: Doomsday late next year. Tatum is approaching Gambit in a different way for the upcoming Marvel movie that thankfully addresses a Deadpool & Wolverine-related concern that was on my mind.
During an interview with Variety, Channing Tatum mentioned that despite Gambit being one of Deadpool & Wolverine’s most popular elements, studio executives “really had to wrap their mind around the accent and how people are going to understand him” for Avengers: Doomsday. The actor’s solution? Tone down his character’s accent. In Tatum’s words:
I’m not gonna go full Cajun…. [Joe and Anthony Russo] want things to be funny, but they don’t want to go full ‘Deadpool.’ They want to keep the drama and keep it tight. When Gambit gets serious — when he drops the Mardi Gras mask — things do matter.
With Deadpool & Wolverine resting as comfortably in the comedy genre as it does the superhero genre, if not more so, it shouldn’t be surprising that Gambit’s accent was intentionally exaggerated for laughs. At one point Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson asks if the Minions were Remy’s dialect coach. But for a movie like Avengers: Doomsday, going that hard on Gambit’s accent and his occasionally incoherent dialogue would surely end up being too distracting.
So although Doomsday will have some humorous moments, it became necessary to ground Gambit a little more… well, as much as you can ground a mutant who throws playing cards charged with kinetic energy. Channing Tatum was also asked during his chat with Variety about whether joining the MCU now made sense. Rather than answering that question directly, he said this:
My singular focus was Gambit. He likes women, he smokes, he drinks. He’s not just a save-the-world kind of guy — we need those, but we need contrast.
Gambit will need to become a save-the-world kind of guy in Avengers: Doomsday, as Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom is set to wreak havoc on the multiverse in both that movie and 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars. Channing Tatum is one of seven X-Men-related actors who are confirmed to appear in Doomsday, though unlike the others, he never appeared in the original X-Men film series. We’ll also reunite with Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, Ian McKellen’s Magneto, Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique, Kelsey Grammer’s Beast, Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler and James Marsden’s Cyclops.
We’ll see how Gambit does alongside these other X-Men characters, as well as the Avengers, New Avengers, Fantastic Four and many others, when Avengers: Doomsday is released on December 18, 2026. Ryan Reynolds is also expected to reprise Deadpool in the tentpole release, although this has yet to be officially confirmed.
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