Posted in: Movies | Tagged: cobra, g.i. joe, gi joe, hasbro, Simon Waters

Hasbro Planning GI Joe Reboot With "Millennial Approach," Still Doesn't Understand Franchise's Core Appeal

Mediocre news for fans of GI Joe! Hasbro is planning to reboot the franchise as part of their goal of creating a Marvel-like shared universe with all of their toy and game properties, according to a profile in the LA Times. Sadly, the company has failed to learn any good lessons from the middling performance of the last two GI Joe films, which took the campy 1980s cartoon and turned it into a boring, modernized generic action flick with heavy helpings of military porn. The solution, according to Hasbro: attempt to modernize it again, this time with a "millennial approach."

"The world has changed, and I think you're going to see GI Joe changing with it," said Hasbro exec and person with a name that would fit perfectly in a 1980s British arena rock band Simon Waters. "There's going to be a much more contemporary approach to the whole franchise, and that will allow us to develop different characters."

What Waters and Hasbro fail to realize is that attempts to modernize GI Joe are what made the first two movies suck in the first place. Nobody wants a contemporary GI Joe that reflects the intricacies of the modern political landscape. We want sailors that talk like Jack Nicholson with emasculating pet parrots talking trash to them, soldiers in garishly colorful costumes who end up just having to punch people in the god damn face because their specializations are so ridiculously specific they have no practical use in 99% of combat situations, hilariously inept, over-the-top villains scheming to take over the world with elaborate plots to control the weather or create giant mutant vegetables, Australian bikers with chainsaws who get high on grape soda and donuts, espionage that involves putting on a plain rubber mask that makes someone look exactly like another character, computers that take up entire rooms with 80 foot screens and the graphics of a Commodore 64, and lots of sweet ninja action and laser gun fights where nobody ever gets injured and everyone parachutes out of their planes, helicopters, and tanks before they explode spectacularly. Embrace the camp, man. It's not that freaking hard.

But Hasbro has other plans: "We hope to create a head snap. It's a different kind of Joe — one that still resonates with Joe fans but brings in an uninitiated audience and expands the audience internationally and domestically."

Sigh.

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