With Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie still scheduled for October 2016, 20th Century Fox is going to need a director as soon as possible. There’s a rumor going around that the studio might have found one: Doug Liman.
The Edge of Tomorrow director was first linked to Gambit in a story on Deadline that mentioned it in passing. However, Slash Film is reporting that TheWrap’s Jeff Sneider confirmed it on Twitter.
It doesn’t look like there is anything close to a done deal, but if Fox is still serious about getting Gambit out on Oct. 7, 2016, the studio better get moving. The project was thrown for a loop when Rupert Wyatt suddenly dropped out last month and the film is scheduled to go in front of cameras in March.
Gambit will star Tatum as the titular member of the X-Men team and his co-star is expected to be Spectre’s Lea Seydoux.
As for Liman, he’s best known for helming Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow and The Bourne Identity. He also directed Cruise’s upcoming Mena and there’s rumors that he also wants Cruise to star in his long-gestating sci-fi pic Luna Park.
Deadline reports that there is also “talk” that Liman and Cruise want to make an Edge of Tomorrow sequel. That might be tough for a studio to take though, since the first film made only $100 million domestically on a $178 million budget. It did much better overseas, so Liman at least has that to latch on to if he’s serious about a sequel.