Fans of Hasbro’s toyline-inspired properties will either rejoice or be bummed by the latest news that Paramount Pictures has delayed both the planned third G.I. Joe movie (reported to be a Snake Eyes spin-off) as well as the long-delayed Micronauts movie.
The G.I. Joe movie will now be released on October 16, 2020, the original date for the Micronauts movie, which has now been moved to June 4, 2021.
The G.I. Joe movie was just cited a few months back at CinemaCon, and that already has a director in Robert Schwentke, no stranger to comic book movies, having directed both RED and R.I.P.D. He’ll be working from a script that was originally written by Beauty and The Beast screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos. There has been no word whether Ray Park aka Darth Maul from the Star Wars movies will be playing Snake Eyes, as he did in the previous two G.I. Joe movies. Those were both non-speaking roles, and they might be looking for someone younger for what’s assumed to be a prequel or origin story.
There hasn’t been any announcements in a while on who might write or direct the Micronauts movie, although J.J. Abrams was involved for a long time as a producer.
Older comic book readers will remember that Marvel Comics released very popular Micronauts comics in the ’80s and helped add to the popularity of G.I. Joe throughout the ’80s and ’90s. In recent years, IDW Comics has revived both properties to create a comic-based shared universe with the Transformers comics. Apparently, Allspark Pictures (a divison of Hasbro) and Paramount are hoping to do something similar with the movies, although so far, there have been six Transformers and two G.I. Joe movies with no connections between them. (A few years back, Allspark even put together a writers’ room to brainstorm ideas for the properties, although that was later disbanded.)
Releasing the Snake Eyes movie next October puts it up against Robert Zemeckis‘ The Witches remake and a yet-to-be-determined Blumhouse movie. Micronauts currently has a weekend to itself on June 4, 2021, but that’s very likely to change.
Personally, I’m more excited for the latter since Micronauts was one of the most popular comics among kids my age when it was introduced in the late ’70s, and sadly, the comics were killed off once Hasbro stopped producing the toy line. I haven’t read many of the IDW Comics, but I know there’s a lot of potential for the characters if you can imagine if all the Avengers can shrink like Ant-Man… and if you saw Avengers: Endgame, you already know they can! Hasbro and Paramount have been teasing the idea of a movie for a decade or more, so at least it still has a release date, and there’s hope for it happening.
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