Most of us know Danny McBride, the actor. The gruff, confident everyman who shows up and wreaks havoc. But McBride is also a very, very talented and successful writer, and one of his next projects seems like it’s going to be a dream come true.
Earlier this year, news broke that McBride (writer and creator of shows such as Eastbound and Down and The Righteous Gemstones) was working on a G.I. Joe movie. Yes, the Hasbro franchise that got its start as the boys’ version of Barbie, before rising to fame in the 1980s as a toy line, cartoon, and comic book. G.I. Joe has seen a few big-screen adaptations over the years, the most recent being an unsuccessful Snake Eyes spinoff and a tantalizing tease at the end of the latest Transformers. But, apparently, McBride is doing something different than that, and he’s very, very excited about it.
Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, McBride talked about how the whole thing came to be. “G.I. Joe was my thing when I was a kid,” McBride said. “I liked that more than Star Wars, more than anything. Like I loved G.I. Joe. And I still have all the [toys].” Apparently, from that, McBride had the idea to do a spinoff based on an evil mercenary group from the Joe universe and actually pitched it to Paramount.
“I’ve always loved [G.I. Joe, and so I had an idea for a Dreadnoks movie,” McBride said. “And I just wanted to do a Dreadnoks movie, and I went to Paramount and pitched it, and they were like, ‘Well, the franchise kind of needs to be launched, so we can’t come out with a Dreadnoks movie. Would you have an angle for G.I. Joe proper?’ And I was like, ‘Hell yeah, I’ll have an angle for that.”
So McBride sat down with some fellow Gemstones writers and figured it out. “We sat down, and we cracked something that we really love a lot,” he said. “Weirdly, it grounds G.I. Joe. It’s not a comedy. It’s kind of suspense and action, and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
In terms of specifics, McBride only said that it was an ensemble movie that follows Duke and a group of Joes and is set in Springfield, a fictional town from the comics that is secretly all Cobra, the mortal enemies of G.I. Joe. “And we have some pretty interesting people lining up to be in it, too,” McBride said, “I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it looks to be like it’s going to be pretty fun.”
Paramount is high on the project, he claims, and the plan is apparently for the film to shoot next year.
McBride did an excellent job finding an angle to bring Michael Myers and the Halloween franchise back recently, and while that series didn’t live up to the potential of its first installment, the ideas were there. Hopefully, the same goes for this, and we finally get a proper, good, G.I. Joe movie. Here’s McBride talking about the project on the podcast.
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