Based on some Hollywood rumors, it was being hypothesized that perhaps director Martin Campbell was slated to be attached to G.I. Joe 3. He was apparently on Lorenzo DiBonaventura’s “wish list” and with Jon Chu relatively busy on other projects, this seemed like something that could possibly happen.
Well, maybe not so much.
Variety is reporting that Campbell is actually attached to a comic book adaptation Sebastian X. According to the article, the script is still in draft stage, so the film is a little ways off. Theoretically I suppose he could end up doing both, but it doesn’t seem likely.
Which leaves the question, if not Campbell, then who? More Jon Chu? He’s working the set of Now You See Me 2 right now, and has already wrapped filming for Jem and the Holograms (I believe) so his dance card may be freeing up. We shall see.
I’ll go on record and say this: Lorenzo DiBonaventura screwed the film franchise with G.I. Joe Retaliation. The casual and veteran fan bases enjoyed G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. It had a nice polish, and introduced viewers to an action-packed world that placed G.I. Joe firmly in the 21st Century. The toy sales were hampered with the bad economy; but have rebounded in the second/online market.
Hasbro and DiBonaventura wanted to go a cheaper route – NOT A BETTER ROUTE – and we got Retaliation. While the actors did their jobs, the film is a letdown from the spirit of the first one. It was even less polished than Battleship!! And to prove I am right, G.I. Joe Retaliation ended with a loss….not a profit. So, it doesn’t pay to listen to a “diehard” fan base; and the film wound up with a loss, while the original made money.
Despite talk of a writers’ strike, The Rise of Cobra still retained a cogent tale that was revealed five years before its release. Retaliation’s backtracking from the Nanomite Wars, and its spartan scope ruined the franchise. It wound up being a breakdown, and not a reboot within a sequel.
Actually, I’ll disagree with the statement that the casual and veteran fan bases enjoyed Rise of Cobra. The reaction I noticed in the fandom was significantly different with RoC being a polarizing issue. For many it was “Joe in Name Only”.
Retaliation was much closer to the comics and toons in overall tone and spirit. RoC tried to be a weird fusion of Thunderball and Iron Man with an unprecedented love story that ultimately ruined the characters of the Baroness and Cobra Commander.
AHAHAHAHA!!!!! It’s okay; the numbers are in; and RETALIATION FAILED! We got a “classic Cobra Commander”….and it still sucked….even the toy line was a downgrade…with reused parts….
Heh, you said it.
ROC was GI Joe all the way… it was fun, exciting, moved at lightning pace, and had all the fun Joe characters we had come to know and love from the brand. The overachieving professional (Scarlett), the eccentric specialist (Breaker), the gruff, no-nonsense leader (Heavy Duty) the comic relief (Ripcord)… I could go on.
I don’t understand all the nuts squealing about accelerator suits, nanomites, and pulse rifles and whatnot. Guess they forget about all the JUMP jet packs, SNAKE armor, BATs, laser artillery weapons, and other off-wall-stuff that has been a part of 3 3/4 inch GI Joe since its inception. Even the advocates of the comic are apparently quick to forget the crazy, Kirby-esque sci-fi elements you mentioned–undersea bases, amphibian tanks, walkers, trojan horse robots, brainwave scanners, etc.
All the elements that make GI Joe what it is are included in Rise of Cobra. Even the story, while nothing spectacular, was decent and easy to follow, using a basic fish-out-of-water premise where Duke and Ripcord (and by extension: the audience) are introduced to the world of GI Joe. I would have loved to have seen where they would have gone with this.
God forbid though, Rise of Cobra tried to do something a little different and some fan(atic)s just couldn’t cope with that.
I loved Rise of Cobra and felt it captured the spirit of GI Joe while adopting a new take on the mythos for a brand new generation.
ROC owed a lot to BOTH the cartoon and comics. The fantastical sci-fi gadgets that have always been part and parcel of Joe lore in both mediums as well as the dynamic between, fun and unique characters. Plus, the use of brainwashed baddies is lifted straight straight out of Hama’s run (Dr. Venom’s/Mindbender’s Brainwave Scanner), as well as the contrived–often convoluted–webs trying central characters together.
In the comic, everyone and their brother had a connection to Snake Eyes. First it was Stalker, Storm Shadow, and Zartan. Then that circle grew to include Cobra Commander, Hawk, Firefly, Destro, and Baroness. Cripes! The movie retained a connection between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, but shifted the central dynamic to Duke, giving him history with both Cobra Commander and the Baroness, as well as offering him a Stalker-like sidekick/confidant in the form of Marlon Wayan’s Ricpord who also filled the roll of the team’s comic relief/wise ass ala Clutch or Shipwreck.
Frankly, I think the movie’s simple dynamic involving Duke is tighter and better adapted than Snake Eyes’ in comics. Both are contrived to be sure, but Snake Eyes’ backstory just ended up becoming way too farcical, included way too many people, and ended up going off the rails.
As for GI Joe Retaliation, I enjoyed it as well but nowhere near as much as Rise of Cobra. Too little character development and interaction outside of Duke and Roadblock towards the beginning and some between Joe Colton and Lady Jaye near the end. Also, too much fan service at the expense of plot and story. For example: Zartan killed the Hard Master… just like in the comics, but are we ever told why?
On the plus side, it did have some good action scenes and Zartan was a freakin’ hoot. Other than that, Rise of Cobra all the way.
After subsequent viewings, I find I don’t like either movie as a whole, but I do like parts of each.
Neither is GIJOE in anything but a remote sense, with ROC being the closer of the two to what GIJOE has been portrayed as.
But really, any live action movie is going to be a distant distortion of GIJOE. The cartoons were frequently silly, the comics hopelessly mired in dull stories and nigh-impenetrable soap-opera.
The toys themselves came with only the vaguest back stories on the file cards………so one really has to cherry-pick from the various media.
The thing is………..what’s valid? What’s not?
I mean, you have to wrestle with all side of this: the crack anti-terrorist team versus the ruthless terrorist organization, but alongside that you have the latter using household pets in a scheme to overthrow the world, and in the former you have said team join forces with leprechauns. That’s in the cartoons.
In the comics, they have the bad guys storming Cape Canaveral in giant walkers that rise out of the ocean, and you have silly characters like the White Clown and Bongo the Balloon Bear.
Those are all integral parts of what GIJOE has been, and far more so that any semblance to Black hawk Down or Act of Valor.
Really, GIJOE is pretty dull when it’s grounded…..because it really offers nothing better than what other films already do better. And when it offers a slice of the fantastic……people ( including fans) don’t seem to take it seriously at all.
In terms of an IP, it’s no wonder to me that it comes across as stagnant and stalled, and forced to try and milk nostalgia in order to move forward at all.
Personally, after these two movies, and I cannot say I’m looking forward to a third GIJOE film at all.
Woah! Where is all of the lies about RoC being a resounding success coming from. In terms of box office profits, both went in the black. Still, RoC wasn’t a good GI Joe film. It was an unrelated scifi movie that Paramount recycled into an Joe film. There were so many plot holes, not to mention that it was downright boring at points.
Here we go! As a rule, it is cool for an introductory installment to make a lot of revenue overseas. G.I. Joe: Retaliation was supposed to make the bulk of its money domestically; it didn’t. As far as The Rise of Cobra not being a Joe film, that is a load of crap. From the Adventure Team to A Real American Hero, G.I. Joe has incorporated science fiction.
For the people like you, the biggest plot hole: RIPCORD!! “It was an unrelated scifi movie that Paramount recycled into a Joe film”……and you FORGET, G.I. JOE VS. COBRA is a reworking of SHIELD vs. Hydra……The Rise of Cobra is the perfect blend of live action and scifi cinematics you would expect…
1: I’m having trouble finding the link now, but I did read that RoC was actually a futeristic war film that Sommers had planed on making anyway. DiBonaventura liked it so much he requested that they turn it into a Gi Joe film. If I ever dig that back up I’ll link to it. Heck, Justin should remember!
2: LOL, actually Ripcord was the only thing I liked about the film. He was the only character that had any life to him.
3: Look, my main problem is that the film was a cliched, poorly acted, poorly written, boring spectacle with sub-par special effects. It didn’t have any of the nicely choreographed fights the Retaliation had. Oh yeah, Ret. made it’s money back domestically aswell. Regardless, RoC is a movie that I remember being a total waste of my time. Sorry. It fine for you to like it though. Just not sure what is with the hostile pre-emptive defense of it?
1. I don’t really have a dog in this hunt and couldn’t care less either way, all I know is I enjoyed the final result.
2. All the characters were fine as were the performers… yes even Tatum. More importantly the team had a great dynamic together–for example, Duke and Ripcord’s friendship, Ripcord and Scarlett’s
budding friendship, Ripcord bouncing smart-ass remarks off of Heavy Duty
which HD blithely ignores, etc. This was an element Retaliation sorely lacked once Duke bit the dust.
3. I’ll concede that Sommers’ effects are generally shitty, this seems to be the case with all this movies (I think he uses his own effects studio?), however everything else about ROC was fine. It’s nothing spectacular but it doesn’t need to be either. It’s a simple, fun action/adventure story with a straightforward plot and good pacing involving decent, well-rounded characters. It didn’t take itself too seriously, but still respected the material.
The biggest problem with Retaliation is that it let too much of the outside world dictate its direction. The fans balked about Rise of Cobra, so the movie spends most of the time “correcting” those so-called issues. Central characters from the first film, like Duke, Destro, and Baroness are excised or outright forgotten, Cobra Commander is reduced to a cardboard cutout (albeit a cool-looking one) to distance him from his ROC incarnation, and as a result we’re left with a bunch of brand new, undeveloped characters that we’re just supposed to care about by default.
Doesn’t work that way.
As a result, Retaliation lacks cohesion. The plot and characters are all over the place and crap is just shoehorned in to service the fans. For example: why did Zartan kill the Hard Master? Also, how long has Storm Shadow known this? Did he just figure this out? How? Did he know all the way back in ROC? Is that why he hated Zartan in the first movie? If so, why didn’t he try to kill him back then? Who the hell knows? Sadly, I’m probably giving this subplot more thought than the filmmakers who clearly just tossed it in there to please the fans–like a bone to a dog. Even worse is that some fans out there consider this sorry excuse for story telling an “improvement” or “fixing” things that weren’t eveb broken in the first place.
They were just different… that’s the only real issue here.
In the end, ROC was better crafted, polished and actually included the fun characters, camaraderie, and dichotomy between good guys and bad guys that we’ve come to expect from GI Joe. Not bad for a fun sci-fi action romp.
Retaliation, despite its attempt at grittiness, lacked a much-needed human element, heart, and a clear direction. In the end, the better effects and badass mountainside fight sequences don’t mean shit if there’s nothing substantial to hang them on.
Sigh… Five years later and folks are still pretending either movie’s box office take matters for a moment to Hasbro or helps the toyline in any way, shape or form.
I get it that with all the trash talking and lecturing among fans that went on during RoC’s disappointing run, folks are still angry and want some sort of vindication to prove that their opinion, whatever it was, was the correct one. But the bottom line is that the little kids who are Hasbro’s primary customer base didn’t like either movie or the toys, so in both cases the toys rotted on the shelf, had to be clearance out, and prompted major retailers to drop the line altogether.
The third movie, if it actually gets made — because if the toy line is dead, I don’t see anyone at Hasbro wanting to bother, no matter if the movies made their money back or not — will I hope, at least be the last one. Unless by some miracle it’s a huge hit and sells a ton of toys. Otherwise, it’s likely it will be the end for a while, with the line going away for a few years. But if and when GI Joe does return, Hasbro will put it’s efforts into a good cartoon, rather then crap movies.