Marvel has kept the pipeline full, releasing project after project across film and streaming, yet one ambitious idea has been stuck in development hell for years. Channing Tatum’s long-promised Gambit solo film never made it to the big screen, even as the studio’s slate kept growing around it. Now, with the actor set to return in Avengers: Doomsday, the fate of that unrealized project is back in the spotlight, and Tatum is reflecting on how it all unraveled.

Three directors came and went, and the Gambit solo film still never made it to the big screen. Tatum now says where it all went wrong.

Channing Tatum received his part of the applause as a Marvel character when he appeared in Deadpool & Wolverine. However, Tatum had been waiting with the trench coat and headband for years. In fact, Tatum promoted a Gambit movie at Comic-Con in 2014. The actor recently revealed to ScreenRant the reason why a standalone Gambit movie never came to be.

"We had three different directors that were signed up to do it, and the first one, the studio, Fox, they had a fallout, so that one didn't work out."

Tatum's revelation to ScreenRant relayed the series of unfortunate events that paved the road for the standalone Gambit movie to become a hamster on a wheel.  The three directors that Tatum brushed past as he tried to get the Gambit movie were Rupert Wyatt, Doug Liman, and Gore Verbinski.

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Tatum is not the only one with his theories about why the movie stalled; the last director who worked with Tatum on Gambit also gave his own reasons behind why he stopped working on the project.

Gore Verbinski’s exit from Gambit followed a pattern that closely mirrors Channing Tatum’s own account of the project’s collapse. The director, an acclaimed filmmaker best known for the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and the Oscar-winning animated film Rango, was only loosely attached to the project and never fully committed to bringing it to the screen. His explanation for stepping away echoes what Tatum has since described: a film that struggled to find stable footing as it moved through development.

"The script we never got to a place where everybody was in agreement." Verbinski told Collider.

Apart from everyone growing apart overtime, Verbinski had a scheduling problem where he had what he tjought were more important matters that he needed to attend do whereas the studio wanted to shoot the movie immediately. Whether it was a studio fallout, a script nobody could agree on, or a calendar that never lined up, Verbinski’s exit was the last of several reasons Gambit never made it to the screen.

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What do you think will be Gambit's future? Let us know in the comments.