Paramount put a real date on its untitled G.I. Joe reboot on Friday, confirming Oct. 20, 2028 with Danny McBride directing and Bradley Cooper cast as Duke. It matters because this is the first G.I. Joe release with an actual date, and an actual movie star, since the franchise went quiet after Snake Eyes flopped in 2021.
Cooper takes over the field-leader role Channing Tatum played in The Rise of Cobra and Retaliation. The numbers explain why Paramount needed someone like him attached. Snake Eyes made $34.7 million worldwide on an $88 million budget, opening to just $13.4 million domestic, while the two Tatum films combined for $678.1 million worldwide. The Rise of Cobra’s $54.7 million opening on Aug. 7, 2009 is still the franchise’s best weekend, 17 years and counting.
McBride wrote the script with Jeff Fradley and John Carcieri, his Righteous Gemstones collaborators (apparently nobody at Paramount minded that his last writing credit involved a televangelist stealing from the collection plate). Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Mark Vahradian and Zev Foreman produce for Hasbro Entertainment, and this is McBride’s feature directing debut after years running his own HBO shows.
Paramount got here by running two scripts at once. Max Landis’s treatment was dropped in March, and a source told Deadline the studio “didn’t commit to the project due to its satirical artistic tone, it had nothing to do with Landis’ past.” McBride’s version kept the Joes, which matters when the toy aisle is part of the revenue model.
McBride didn’t start out chasing this version. “G.I. Joe was my thing when I was a kid,” he said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “I had an idea for a Dreadnoks movie.” Paramount sent him back for something built around “G.I. Joe proper” instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hltxhsePkEI
What he returned with is Duke, a squad and Springfield, the comic-book town that’s secretly all Cobra. “It’s not a comedy, it’s like kind of suspense and action,” McBride said, which is the one line that should recalibrate anyone expecting Eastbound and Down with grenades.
The bigger clarity is the crossover question. Deadline reported the film is no longer building toward a Transformers team-up, and Collider confirmed that project, seeded in 2023’s Rise of the Beasts, is dead as of Oct. 1. The robots live on elsewhere: Variety reported a separate Transformers project is in the works with Steven Spielberg producing. Cooper signed on after reading McBride’s script and meeting him, even with his Warners Ocean’s prequel opposite Margot Robbie dated June 25, 2027 (McBride already had one Cooper favor on the books, a guest spot on The Righteous Gemstones).
What this probably means: Oct. 20, 2028 is a reservation, not a finished movie. McBride said in July he hoped to shoot the following year, which points to a 2027 production window, and Cooper remains the only cast member Paramount has named. The date also lands two weeks ahead of the untitled Duffer Brothers movie Paramount has set for Nov. 3, 2028, so the studio is pricing Joe as a tentpole, not filler.
For anyone who skipped Snake Eyes on purpose: nothing to catch up on. No crossover to track, no prequel homework, just a comedy director’s word that Cobra runs the town and he’s not kidding around about it this time.
