Ryan Reynolds Suggests That the Funniest Cameo in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Could Become An Entire Spin-off

A nearly forgotten Marvel antihero might be about to make a name for himself here.

With his first-ever fully Disney produced Deadpool film, Ryan Reynolds wanted to use the change of the corporate daddies to diss the piss-poor state of every company in the comic book movie business that couldn’t manage to turn classic, beloved superheroes and supervillains into sprawling gajillion-dollar franchises. Armed with his biggest budget yet and wielding the full strength of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (as well as an adamantium skeleton), Reynolds made Deadpool & Wolverine the most ambitious and comprehensive parody of the superhero movie genre to date as he tied up loose ends and went heavy on the industry in-jokes while skewering the legacy of the 20th Century Fox X-Men movie series, the Blade trilogy and Fantastic Four’s entire failed filmography.

But out of all the forgotten franchises, characters and abandoned projects that Deadpool & Wolverine briefly brought back from the dead, one cameo caught the attention of the MCU brass better than any other: Channing Tatum’s performance as the Cajun card-thrower Gambit. Now, almost a decade after Fox first attempted to get a Gambit solo film starring Tatum off the ground, Reynolds says that Disney is “obsessed with him in that role.”

So is everyone else who watched Deadpool & Wolverine, I do declare.

The topic of Tatum’s performance in Deadpool & Wolverine came up during Reynolds’ recent appearance on Entertainment Weekly's Awardist podcast, and, while Reynolds didn’t want to oversell the future of Tatum’s Gambit, he said that he heard some extremely positive feedback from his new partners. “I honestly don’t know what goes on behind closed doors in the bookkeeping sessions at Marvel, but I do know that they’re obsessed with him in that role,” Reynolds explained of Tatum’s Disney hype.

“It’s kind of like the same situation I went through,” Reynolds said, referencing the full decade he spent trying to convince the movers and shakers of the movie business to give Deadpool his own R-rated feature. “Once you show that it works well, that’s really what they need. Sometimes they just need to see it in action.”

“And Channing is so singular in how he plays that character,” Reynolds added of the cameo, “but also he’s so beautiful physically, the way he moves and the way he can pick up steps.”

Comic book fans will recall that Fox first attempted to make a standalone Gambit film for Tatum within their X-Men movie universe back in 2014, but the project spent five years in development hell before the bigwigs finally let it die. Given his own experience with the arduous process of bringing a beloved but B-list superhero to life on film, Reynolds refused to say for sure whether Deadpool & Wolverine revived the hope for a Gambit feature, but, as he said, “I hope so.”

I hope so, too — you know how long I been waidin fo dis?