Iconic Marvel Comics villain Mister Sinister narrowly missed his chance to appear in Fox's X-Men movie franchise. According to Dark Phoenix writer/director Simon Kinberg, the plan was for Sinister to appear in the now canceled Gambit movie starring Channing Tatum.Kinberg confirmed those story plans while taking part in IGN's Watch From Home Theater for X-Men: Days of Future Past. 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse was indeed meant to set the stage for a Mister Sinister-driven X-Men movie. Just maybe not the one fans would have guessed.All the X-Men Movies That Probably Won’t Happen Now (and a Few That Will)"We had a tease of it at the end of Apocalypse. The Essex Corp is something that you see in a tag at the end of Apocalypse," said Kinberg. "We had talked about doing something with him, and I won't get into the specifics of it since it's no longer a 20th Century Fox property and now it's part of the MCU. I have no idea what the plan is. But Mister Sinister was going to be part of the Gambit movie starring Channing Tatum."
This seems to discredit another popular online rumor suggesting Sinister would have a cameo in New Mutants (with actors like Jon Hamm and Daniel Craig rumored for the role), setting him up as a major villain in that particular spinoff series. Indeed, Kinberg told IGN that plans for Mr. Sinister never got close enough to the casting stage so you can forget about those rumors of Hamm and Craig.
A Gambit movie has been in various stages of development ever since the character's live-action debut in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Channing Tatum came aboard to star in and produce the Gambit movie in 2014. Sadly, despite appearing at Comic-Con in 2015 alongside Stan Lee and the rest of the X-Men movie-verse cast, Tatum's dream of playing the Ragin' Cajun never materialized. The film cycled through several directors, including Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), and Gore Verbinski (the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy). But ultimately, Gambit was one of many planned X-Men movies canceled after Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox.As Kinberg alludes, there's no telling what Marvel Studios' plans for the X-Men franchise are right now. It's always possible the Gambit movie will survive the transition to Disney (as Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool 3 seems to have done) and we may still see Tatum given the chance to play Gambit at long last. But for now, fans may need to wait a very long time to see Gambit finally battle Mister Sinister on the big screen.
Check back soon for even more juicy tidbits revealed during the Days of Future Past WFH Theater stream.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.