Not satisfied with making headlines last night for being the winning bid to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount has another surprise announcement up its sleeve, with reports revealing the future of G.I. Joe on the big screen. Though the film rights to the iconic toy brand have been with Paramount for decades, they’ve yet to find a major way to make the series into a feature film franchise. 2009’s The Rise of Cobra was a moderate success, making way for 2013’s Retaliation, the pair of which brought in a combined $675 million globally. But 2021’s reboot, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, flopped, leaving the real American heroes in limbo.
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Now, The Hollywood Reporter brings word that controversial screenwriter Max Landis has been tapped to revive the G.I. Joe franchise and will pen the script for a new movie. Landis was once considered a Wunderkind in Hollywood after the success of 2012’s Chronicle (which he wrote) paved the way for a slew of other scripts that were written by the son of director John Landis. In 2019, though, Landis’ career largely vanished after The Daily Beast posted an extensive piece about sexual assault allegations against him, sourcing eight women. Since then, his work has been confined exclusively to videos on his own YouTube channel.
Dueling GI Joe Reboots Being Written (Including By a Shocking Writer)
The surprise return of Max Landis to Hollywood, especially with a high-profile project like a major franchise reboot at a studio with new ownership, is somehow not even the end of the weirdness that is this latest update. According to THR, the G.I. Joe script being penned by Landis isn’t even the only one that has been commissioned by the studio. In addition to the G.I. Joe movie written by Landis, a second G.I. Joe revival is being written by none other than Danny McBride. Though best known to many for his work in front of the camera as Kenny Powers, McBride has also written quite a lot in Hollywood, especially projects he’s starred in, including The Righteous Gemstones, Vice Principals, and Eastbound & Down, plus non-acting projects like 2018’s Halloween and its sequels.
In case you thought the weird factor of this update on the G.I. Joe franchise was somehow over, or would perhaps find a way to stop being bizarre, there’s more. The trade goes on to note that the current plan is for Paramount to take these two scripts and then blend them into one. It’s not out of the ordinary, especially for Paramount, to develop multiple scripts at once for one of their biggest properties, but to commission two different takes on the material with the sole intention of meshing them together is a very bizarre move, and one with little to no precedence in Hollywood.
It remains to be seen how this new take on G.I. Joe will be influenced by what has come before it. The three live-action feature films made in the series so far have all shared a loose continuity, but one imagines that the new ownership at Paramount would prefer to start fresh and begin the franchise anew, with only their fingerprints on it. As a result, one imagines that this means the previously teased crossover between G.I. Joe and Transformers is off the table, as a scene from 2023’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts set up for the future. That remains unconfirmed at this time, but Lorenzo di Bonaventura remains the producer for both the G.I. Joe and Transformers movies, so anything is possible.
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