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Oh Hollywood

Hollywood Weirdness of the Day: Imminent G.I. Joe Sequel Pushed Back Nine Months

by Susana Polo | 2:01 pm, May 24th, 2012


We haven’t done a lot of coverage of G.I. Joe: Retaliation here, for a number of reasons. None of the editors are huge fans of G.I. Joe, so it’s difficult to write about it with knowledge. The first movie… uh… was not considered to be that great. And while I found the trailer really amusing, with its transparent excitement over having Bruce Willis in the movie, it wasn’t amusing enough to get me interested in the movie.

But now G.I. Joe: Retaliation has done something really interesting, really inexplicable, and quite possibly really stupid. Yesterday, Retaliation was one month and five days from release. Today, it is ten months and four days from release.

Late yesterday afternoon Paramount announced that GIJ:R would not be premiering next month like everybody thought, and instead will be delayed nine entire months, until March 29th, 2013, ostensibly so that it can be retrofitted to 3D. This is an exceedingly weird decision to make for a film that’s only a month from release and already has a significant ad campaign push behind it, to say nothing (and it’s a big nothing) of the toy push from Hasbro, the folks who licensed the concept to Paramount for movie making in the first place. A lot of things get put on hold when a movie gets delayed: salaries, PR campaigns, and press tours. But when toys get put on hold, you gotta find someplace to put them. Or you could just release all your movie tie in toys nine months away from the movie they tie in to…

The question remaining is what does Paramount think it’s going to gain by painstakingly converting the movie to 3D (and for what it’s worth, let it not go unmentioned that if they wanted to Paramount could probably give GIJ:R a slapdash 3D job in a couple of months rather than nine, which speaks to a greater commitment to actually giving it a well made treatment), or what does it think it will lose by releasing the movie this summer. There are lots of possibilities.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Paramount sources say it’s all about wanting to recoup their investment, which apparently cannot be done without 3D processing, but that leaves open the question of why that was only realized now, and not months ago when the film was actually in production. Was the company scared off by the abysmal opening of Battleship, Hasbro’s other licensed dog in 2012′s summer blockbuster fight? Or by the idea of competing against The Avengers, Prometheus, a Pixar film, and (later in the summer) two more superhero flicks? Is Paramount worried about pairing a summer full of highly anticipated franchise-continuing movies with a sequel to a movie franchise that didn’t have a great run the last time it showed up in theaters? Hey, it’s not stopping The Amazing Spider-Man. Though, I think my favorite of the proposed explanations I saw on twitter is that G.I. Joe: Retaliation is pregnant.

Either way, I’m sorry, G.I. Joe fans. This one really did look better than the last one. Luckily for you, the Mayan apocalypse is totally a dud.

(via Blastr.)

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  • http://twitter.com/IvidiaKt Ividia Kt

     It’s one of the dumbest moves Paramount has pulled, kind of like alienating a whole slew of Trek fans but suddenly becoming worried about the Trek IP after letting it languish for 20 years.

  • http://www.thediscriminatingfangirl.com/ TDF Pamela

    I have the feeling they’re doing this because The Avengers is still whipping everything else at the box office, and they’re afraid it’s going to take away from GI Joe ticket sales.

    And really, I’d rather pay to go see Avengers again than see GI Joe.

  • Anonymous

    Let’s face it, we all know G.I. Joe will be a complete piece of sh*t- and so does Paramount. They’re looking at Avengers and going-”Uh..yyyyeah, let’s uh, wait on this one for a few months, huh?”

  • Anonymous

    I’m not saying that they’re doing it just to avoid competing with bigger and (probably) better summer movies, but if they were just doing it for that, it’d be the right decision. I mean I really haven’t heard a single person say that this was the movie they were looking forward to in 2012. I’m sure someone likes it, but it’s a bad year to be a G.I. Joe sequel…

    They’re right about the money though, 3D lets them charge more at the low, low cost of annoying the moviegoing public.

  • Nick Gaston

    Well…it’s a slightly better strategy than destroying the footage, claiming it was the work of Chinese hackers, and trying to collect from the insurance companies.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Travis.K.Fischer Travis Kyle Fischer

    Look at The Avengers. Now look at Battleship.

    G.I.Joe would have been up against Brave coming out the week before it and Amazing-Spider-Man coming out the week after it.
    With Prometheus and Brave in front of it and Spider-Man and Batman behind it, G.J. Joe wasn’t going to make a dime this summer.

    It’s like all of a sudden we live in a world where you can’t just throw crap up on the screen and make millions of dollars.

  • http://shiftercat.livejournal.com/ ShifterCat

    “This one really did look better than the last one.”

    Damning with faint praise?

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_VK7U6RFTAUIPW2JR2NGPBP2IYA super

    considering GI Joe was the boy cartoon of boy cartoons its not surprising that no writers here is really a fan of it.  Sure it had many great female characters but growing up i knew of ZERO girls who ever watched it. 
     

  • http://www.thenerdybird.com/ Jill Pantozzi

    I preferred M.A.S.K.

  • http://twitter.com/birdieboots Kelsi D.

    Funny thing about the new G.I. Joe movie. They actually shot it at the plantation house where my grandma works giving tours (and where I once worked doing the same), and were shooting during a trip I took with my friends one weekend to stay at the house. We heard Bruce Willis was going to be in the movie, so later on when we were (very) tipsy from margaritas, we wandered around the house and grounds yelling “BRUCE! BRUCE! WE MADE YOU A MARGARITA!” 

    It was good times. Still won’t see the movie, though.

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