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.)
