‘G.I. Joe: Retaliation’ scored $375 million at the box office and was more satisfying to most fans than the first installment of the franchise, so it is no surprise that Paramount has been working on a third movie for several months now.  Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is looking to reprise his role as Roadblock in the follow-up and while promoting his latest action epic, ‘Hercules’, commented that it sounds as if a third ‘G.I. Joe’ was on its way but without it’s ‘Retaliation’ director, Jon M. Chu.

“Well, the idea is that we would start shooting ‘G.I. Joe’ in January, in the first quarter of next year. That’s the idea. Look, I love Jon, and I think he did a great job. I get it. He had to go on and do something else.”

That something else coincidentally turns out to be ‘Jem & The Holograms’ another 80s property based on a Hasbro toy line with a cartoon produced by Marvel/Sunbow, just like ‘G.I. Joe’.  ‘Jem’ hasn’t begun production yet.  In fact, Chu along with producers Scooter Braun and Jason Blum just announced their intention to make the movie but solicited fans for script ideas, music, fashion design and so forth… essentially everything that goes into making a movie, so it will likely be years before the Truly Outrageous movie arrives in theaters. But it sounds as if Chu is out regardless, as Johnson stated “We’re still looking” when asked if they’d found a new director.

‘Retaliation’ was a fresh start for the ‘G.I. Joe’ franchise, whose future was uncertain after the rocky first outing.  (The fact that they killed off most of the first film’s cast, including Channing Tatum, who played Duke showed that this was a total reboot.)  But with Johnson confirmed to be part of a third movie, it doesn’t sound as if the next movie will be such a hard relaunch.  No word on whether Bruce Willis or any of the rest of the second film’s cast will be turning up again.  At any rate, there are roughly nine billion characters in the ‘Joe’ franchise so it wouldn’t be a stretch to bring in any new characters.Chu was already a fan of the franchise, but these are the very definition of “pop corn” flicks, so it’s not as if another director needs to capture a particular “voice” or “vision.”

What do you want to see in a third ‘G.I. Joe’ movie?  Any Joes or Cobra characters you want to see on the big screen?

Source: Collider