Director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, Van Helsing) has enlisted to lead the troops for Paramount Pictures’ live-action feature film based on the G.I. Joe toy line and animated television series. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie will adhere to the 1980s incarnation of the property, which was born in 1942 with David Breger’s comic strip in military mag Stars and Stripes.
In the G.I. Joe cartoons, an elite group of American soldiers with an arsenal of high-tech weapons, gadgets and vehicles takes on an evil organization known as Cobra in epic skirmishes that span the globe. The adventures were also printed in a series of comic books from Marvel Comics.
With the blockbuster success of DreamWorks/Paramount’s Transformers and the threat of a writer’s strike looming, some G.I. Joe fans are worried that Paramount may be rushing the film into production with a script that hasn’t exactly received the seal of approval from fanboys who have managed to get their hands on it. Sommers, who writes most of the films he directs, is likely to do his own draft.
Lorenzo Di Bonaventura is producing G.I. Joe, which is sure to involve a lot of digital effects work. There is no word yet on which vfx house will carry the job, but Sommers has a long-standing relationship with ILM, going back to his 1998 cult-favorite creature feature Deep Rising and continuing through the two Mummy movies and Van Helsing.
