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*Warning, ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ spoilers to follow*
Channing Tatum has effusively thanked Ryan Reynolds for allowing him to cameo as X-Men character Gambit in the new Marvel blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine.
Tatum, 44, spent several years developing a standalone Gambit film for 20th Century Fox, but the project fell through when Disney and Fox merged in 2019.
Tatum’s appearance in Deadpool & Wolverine marks his first outing as the character.
On X/Twitter, Tatum posted pictures of himself and Reynolds at Comic-Con ten years apart, along with a heartfelt message.
“These pictures are almost 10 years apart to the day,” he wrote. “I sat in the audience when Ryan Reynolds showed his first peek of Deadpool 1 to the world and I think I ran back stage right after and found him and I think I just hugged him and was like holy s*** you did it man. It’s perfect.
“I didn’t know him really at all back then. But since then I can say that there is almost no one that has had my back in this industry more than [Reynolds]. I thought I had lost Gambit forever. But he fought for me and Gambit. I will owe him probably forever.
“Cause I’m not sure how I could ever do something that would be equal to what this has meant to me. I love ya buddy. [Director Shawn Levy] as well. Truly such a brilliant creator on every single level. All things happen for a reason. I’m so grateful to be in this movie. It’s a masterpiece in my opinion. And just pure bad ass joy. I was literally screaming in the theater. LFG!!”
Deadpool & Wolverine sees the return of Hugh Jackman’s bearded mutant Wolverine, who died in 2017’s Logan. The movie follows the two superheroes as they team up to protect the multiverse and save the world from existential threat.
During the film, the pair encounter a team of throwback superheroes from the 20th Century Fox era of Marvel films. They include Tatum’s Gambit along with Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, Wesley Snipes’ Blade, Chris Evans’s Johnny Storm (from Fantastic Four) and Dafne Keen’s mini-Wolverine from Logan.
Not everyone was thrilled by these surprise cameos. Writing for The Independent, Louis Chilton argued that the film is not just bad, it changes the definition of what a “movie” is.
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“The film invites us to gawp at these comebacks,” writes Chilton. “Meta-referential dialogue explains that these characters, ostensibly stuck in some kind of out-of-universe “void”, are simply trying to get the endings they deserve. What these ‘deserved endings’ actually look like in practice is fewer than 10 lines of dialogue apiece – in Snipes’ case, mostly just repeating catchphrases from the first three Blade films – before they all drive out to a skirmish in the desert and get swallowed up by some kind of deadly CGI air monster.
“There’s no attempt at characterisation, no point behind the meta-joke. The insistence that audiences are for some reason gagging to see Reynolds’ Deadpool exchange one line of insipid banter with Tatum’s Gambit, is baffling.”
