Yo, Joe! G.I. Joe, America’s daring, highly-trained special mission force, is headed back to the big screen. Toymaker Hasbro is partnering with longtime collaborator Paramount to bring the long-running toy line, whose origins date back to the 1960s, back into live-action for the first time in over a decade.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, The Righteous Gemstones‘ Danny McBride, who was previously revealed to be writing the film’s screenplay, will helm a new live-action take on G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. The film has been in the works for some time; McBride and Max Landis were said to be working on competing takes on the project, with McBride‘s take winning out. It will be McBride‘s feature film debut as director: he has previously directed episodes of Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones, and has penned a number of theatrical screenplays, including The Foot Fist Way, Your Highness, and all three films of David Gordon Green‘s Halloween trilogy. McBride recently spoke about his love for the franchise, and how his script was inspired by Larry Hama‘s classic G.I. Joe comics of the 1980s; he also said that Hasbro was “fired up” about the project, and anticipated that the movie would begin filming in 2027.
What Is ‘G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero’?
G.I. Joe began as a 12-inch action figure; debuting in 1964 as “America’s Moveable Fighting Man,” he was the first action figure, and could be posed in a wide variety of action poses, and outfitted with extensive combat gear. However, as the decades progressed, the Vietnam War made realistic army toys less popular, and the oil crisis made full-sized action figures more expensive. Thus, Hasbro introduced G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero in 1982. Downsized to 3.75 inches, but still almost as articulated, the new figures were given codenames like Duke, Snake-Eyes, and Scarlett, and positioned as part of a strike force opposed to the evil forces of Cobra, a subversive terrorist organization determined to rule the world. The toys were extremely popular, especially since their small size meant they could be used in a variety of high-tech vehicles, and they soon found their way into comic books and cartoons.
The G.I. Joe team has previously hit the big screen in live-action two times, most recently in 2013’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation; 2021’s Snake Eyes, a solo outing for the popular G.I. Joe ninja, was meant to kickstart a franchise with the whole ensemble, but it disappointed at the box office. More recently, a G.I. Joe/Transformers team-up was teased at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts; Chris Hemsworth was reportedly part of the project, but there has been no news on it for some time.
Danny McBride will direct a new G.I. Joe movie, which is now in development.
via Collider