Good news for anyone who used to dress as a G.I. Joe character for Halloween. The next G.I. Joe movie, as of now, is set to open mere days before Halloween, two years from now. Per Variety, October 20th, 2028 is the official release date. Now they just have to actually film it. Though the new film has yet to get an official title, it’s set to be based on the simulation town of Springfield. That’s a fake community inspired by the TV show The Prisoner, with which to confuse captive Joe team members and get them to confess their secrets to the terrorist organization Cobra.
Cobra are G.I. Joe’s primary adversaries, but thus far, their will be know such foes at the box office for opening week. No other major movie has planted a flag on that date yet — two more seasonal entries duke it out the week prior, with Dan Trachtenberg’s Freddy the 13th set to face an as-yet-unnamed Blumhouse film.
With Danny McBride set to direct a script he cowrote, Bradley Cooper will lead the good guys as First Sergeant Conrad “Duke” Hauser, previously played by Channing Tatum. In the animated series adaptation of the Springfield story, parrot-enthusiast sailor Shipwreck was the protagonist caught in the strange town. We don’t yet know if the movie will switch it up and have Duke be the captive, or instead be active on the outside trying to rescue Shipwreck, or another character. In the cartoons, Duke is typically portrayed as the leader of the Joe team, though as far as the toys are concerned, rank-wise, he is subordinate to General Clayton ‘Hawk” Abernathy.
In 2009, G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra opened on the same day as the Milla Jovovich thriller A Perfect Getaway, the semi-Julia Child biopic Julie & Julia starring Amy Adam and Meryl Streep, Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera’s faux-documentary Paper Heart, Larry Fessenden’s indie horror I Sell the Dead, and the Paul Giamatti-starring indie sci-fi flick Cold Souls. G.I. Joe opened at #1 domestically with $54.7 million, still the highest opening of any G.I. Joe movie. In 2013, G.I. Joe: Retaliation would ultimately gross more, totaling $375.5 million worldwide — its only major opening-week competitors were Tyler Perry’s Temptation and the low-budget alien invasion movie The Host.
The 2021 prequel/reboot Snake Eyes, on the other hand, was an outright bomb, earning only $40 million worldwide. It had stiffer competition, and lost the weekend to M. Night Shyamalan’s existential horror comic adaptation Old. Mark Wahlberg’s anti-bullying movie Joe Bell also opened that weekend, along with the Val Kilmer documentary Val. Snake Eyes might have lost some of the fan base by having the classically silent character talk, and by omitting most of the major G.I. Joe characters from the story. It’s typically an ensemble IP about a team — imagine an A-Team movie solely about Hannibal, with no B.A. or Murdock, and you get the idea.
Does October sound like a yo-Joe time of year, or more of a no-go? Be a real hero and let us know your thoughts.
