Producer producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura confirms that the GI Joe action series may have life in it yet.
GI Joe has a lot to answer for. Not just as the decades-old toy brand become the basis for a series of action movies that… well let’s just say that they’re not classics of the genre. But also, in the early 1990s, toymaker Hasbro was so keen to mashup the wildly popular Street Fighter brand with its GI Joe toys that it meddled with the development of 1994’s Street Fighter to make it increasingly ‘toyetic’, ruining a film that wasn’t even about GI Joe.
The more recent entry in the series, 2021’s Snake Eyes is believed to have lost Paramount a fair chunk of cash, whilst Channing Tatum was so desperate to get out of 2013’s GI Joe: Retaliation, he famously demanded to be killed off.
Despite it being difficult to recall a time when the GI Joe franchise wasn’t in decline, Paramount is pressing ahead with another film in the series according to producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Apparently, a 2021 collaboration with Amazon was set to give long-time Joe, Lady Jaye her own show before tying into a movie. Although that was eventually shelved, it seems like parts of that project are being revived for another film in the series.
“We actually developed a pilot with Amazon,” di Bonaventura told Collider. “This was before Paramount+, just as Paramount+ was coming in. It didn’t pan out. We are in a lot of conversations about what to do with it as a film, and so I would have to say, most likely, you’re going to see that come to fruition. How soon is always impossible to say. For a long time, there were no active conversations. There’s a lot going on right now.”
We can’t help but think Paramount might be wise to just let this one lie. The GI Joe movie brand just isn’t very strong following three tepid films, the last of which is reported to have lost the studio somewhere in tens of millions of dollars range. If a spin-off featuring Snake Eyes, by far one of the franchise’s most popular characters, didn’t mobilise fans of the series to buy a cinema ticket, we wonder what it might have up its sleeve to justify a third film.
Could it be the already-announced GI Joe: Ever Vigilant which was greenlit all the way back in 2013 and never came to fruition? We doubt it. There were some pretty good GI Joe and Transformers crossover comics back in the day but with the latter franchise motoring along nicely for Paramount, the studio is unlikely to risk the health of one brand to try and revive another. We’ll let you know more on this one if we hear it but it could be a while.
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