New GI Joe Spinoff Announced to Follow Snake-Eyes Movie

Paramount Pictures is betting big on its reinvention of the GI Joe universe on the big screen. The upcoming Snake Eyes movie will wipe the slate clean and start over fresh, and the studio is already thinking about what will come next. The Hollywood Reporter brings word that screenwriters Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, who previously penned Race, Seberg, and a draft of the Edge of Tomorrow sequel, have been tapped to write the script for the new GI Joe movie. Details are scarce for now on the film but the trade notes that the movie isn’t being billed as a Snake Eyes sequel but instead an “expansion” of the GI Joe world on the big screen. Franchise producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura will once again produce the project along with Hasbro’s Allspark Pictures.

The Snake Eyes movies will star Crazy Rich Asians breakout Henry Golding as the titular masked assassin, rebooting the feature film continuity of GI Joe. Previously the character was played on the big screen by Darth Maul himself Ray Park with actors like Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Bruce Willis all appearing alongside him.

Directed by Robert Schwentke (The Divergent Series) the film will tell the origins of the character. The film will also feature plenty of other familiar faces from the lore of GI Joe that fans know and love including Samara Weaving (Ready or Not) as Scarlett, Ursula Corbero (La casa de papel) as The Baroness, Iko Uwais (The Raid) as Hard Master, withAndrew Koji (Warrior) as Storm Shadow, and Steve Allerick as Snake Eyes’ father. Haruka Abe (Emerald City) has been cast as well in a currently-unknown role.

“We are going to the origin story,” di Bonaventura said in 2018. “As you know in the comic book, you saw his face. And it is, I’ll say, the formation of a hero.”

Production on Snake Eyes wrapped just a few weeks before the coronavirus pandemic shut down feature film sets around the world. Post-production on the movie is likely still ongoing as other films are in a similar boat with visual effects houses moving all their employees to remote working stations in their homes.

As of this writing Snake Eyes remains on the release schedule for a October 23 premiere from Paramount, but whether the film will be delayed remains to be seen as it’s still unclear when movie theaters will be able to re-open.