A sailor with a parrot on his shoulder wakes up in a quiet hospital, is told that the war against Cobra is over, and goes home to a wife, a tidy house and a pleasant little town called Springfield. The neighbors are friendly, and they keep asking him, very politely, about a secret formula. That is the setup of “There’s No Place Like Springfield,” a two-part episode of the Sunbow cartoon from 1985, and it is now the blueprint for Paramount’s next attempt at a live-action “G.I. Joe” movie. Bradley Cooper has signed on to star as Duke, the field leader of the Joes, in the new film from Danny McBride, who is directing from a script he wrote with Jeff Fradley and John Carcieri. The news broke as a Deadline exclusive, and Variety and TheWrap say the studio has since confirmed it.
The project is a reimagining rather than a continuation, so it has no tie to the three earlier live-action films. Deadline adds that it has been uncoupled from the “Transformers” crossover teased at the end of “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” in 2023, which is no longer in development. What makes the casting interesting, beyond the obvious novelty of putting a 12-time Oscar nominee at the front of a toy movie, is that McBride has spent the summer insisting his film is not a comedy, and that the cartoon episode he keeps pointing to was never really a Duke story at all. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “There’s No Place Like Springfield” and for the earlier live-action films.
What makes the casting interesting, beyond the obvious novelty of putting a 12-time Oscar nominee at the front of a toy movie, is that McBride has spent the summer insisting his film is not a comedy, and that the cartoon episode he keeps pointing to was never really a Duke story at all.”
The way the deal came together is a small story about leverage and timing. According to Deadline, McBride won the job after his take was one of a handful of pitches Paramount heard earlier this year. Once he had it, he drew up a wish list of actors, with Cooper sitting at the very top. There was no guarantee it would happen, because Cooper is currently writing, directing and starring opposite Margot Robbie in the Warner Bros. prequel to “Ocean’s Eleven,” which is shooting in Europe after he stepped in to replace Lee Isaac Chung during preproduction. After reading the script and sitting down with McBride, though, he wanted the part, and Deadline says negotiations started in recent weeks, an account Kotaku and Cosmic Book News both repeat. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Mark Vahradian and Zev Foreman are producing for Hasbro Entertainment.
Cooper has said yes to McBride once before, on almost exactly the same terms. The fourth and final season of “The Righteous Gemstones” opened with “Prelude,” an episode McBride directed and wrote with Carcieri and Fradley. Cooper played Elijah Gemstone, a swindler and runaway criminal in 1862 Virginia who kills a minister for his collection money and ends up posing as a chaplain for Confederate soldiers. McBride told The Hollywood Reporter at the time, in remarks quoted by ScreenRant, that he assumed the actor would never come down to Charleston for no money to do a Civil War period piece, and that he was wrong. “We sent him the script and he instantly got back to me,” McBride said, adding, “He dug the material and was flattered we asked,” a sequence that sounds a lot like what Deadline describes this time around.
McBride has been unusually open about what he is making, mostly thanks to a July appearance on Josh Horowitz’s “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, which Empire, Collider and Cosmic Book News all quoted at length. “You’re following Duke and a group of other Joes,” he said, before explaining the setting. “There’s that town in the comics, Springfield, which is a town that’s secretly all Cobra. That is where our film takes place,” McBride told Horowitz. On tone, he was just as direct, telling Horowitz, “It’s not a comedy. It’s like kind of suspense and action,” and adding that he hoped to be shooting next year. In the same conversation, he said he first went to Paramount with an idea for a movie about the Dreadnoks, Zartan’s punk biker gang. The studio told him the franchise had to be relaunched properly first, and asked whether he had an angle on the Joes themselves.
The episode he borrowed from is a stranger choice than it looks, and a more promising one. Written by Steve Gerber, the comics writer best known for creating Howard the Duck, “There’s No Place Like Springfield” follows Shipwreck, not Duke. He wakes up inside an elaborate fake life, complete with a wife and family, built by Cobra to coax a secret formula out of him. Den of Geek compares the premise to “The Prisoner” and to a famous “Twilight Zone” episode. ComicBook notes that the Marvel comics story behind it took its cue from “The Prisoner” as well, which is roughly the register McBride seems to be chasing when he says suspense. In Larry Hama’s Marvel comics, as Collider notes, Springfield goes further still, serving as the home town where Cobra was founded and where the ordinary residents are, in fact, the enemy.
That raises the most interesting open question about Cooper’s role, which is how much of the movie actually belongs to him. ComicBook points out that McBride has described a story following Duke and a group of other Joes. If the script stays close to the cartoon, the site argues, Duke might spend part of the second act on the sidelines while someone else is trapped inside the town. That is speculation, and the studio has not released a plot beyond the setting, but The Hollywood Reporter also describes the film as an ensemble, which fits. Duke, in other words, may end up as the anchor of the team rather than the man waking up in Springfield. That would be a very different lead role from the one the earlier films handed Channing Tatum.
The comedy question is fair to ask, given McBride’s résumé, but the answer is already on the record in his writing credits. He co-wrote the 2018 “Halloween” with David Gordon Green and Jeff Fradley, then stayed on as a writer for “Halloween Kills” and “Halloween Ends.” Whatever fans made of the last one, those three horror films did not play Michael Myers for laughs. “Prelude,” for all its jokes, was built around a con man who finds his way to real faith in the middle of a war, and McBride told TV Insider that Cooper’s character “rises to the occasion” by the end. What he has not done, as The Hollywood Reporter and Variety both note, is direct a feature, and his directing work so far has been episodes of his own HBO series, including the “Gemstones” pilot and some of “Vice Principals.” A Hasbro tentpole is a large first film by any measure.
The franchise he inherits has never quite found its footing in live action. Stephen Sommers directed “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” in 2009, with Tatum as Duke and Dennis Quaid as General Hawk, and TheWrap puts its worldwide gross at $302 million against a $175 million budget, a result Paramount wanted to be bigger. Jon M. Chu’s “Retaliation” followed in 2013, handed the lead to Dwayne Johnson as Roadblock and killed off Tatum’s Duke early, then grossed about $376 million without producing a third film. The 2021 spinoff “Snake Eyes,” with Henry Golding as the silent ninja, collapsed at roughly $40 million worldwide, according to both TheWrap and Deadline, and the series has been dormant since.
Cooper also changes what Duke looks like on screen, and that is not a small thing for a character who has been the heroic face of the line since the 1980s. Comics Beat notes that Cooper is 51 while Tatum, now 46, was far younger when he took the part, and reads the casting as a sign the film will skip yet another origin story in favor of an older, seasoned commander. ComicBook makes a similar case from the cartoon side, arguing that the animated Duke always carried more gravitas and experience than the reckless young soldier Tatum played. Neither outlet has inside knowledge of the script, but the logic is hard to argue with, since nobody casts a 12-time Oscar nominee in his fifties to play a rookie.
For Cooper, the role is a return to the type of movie he has mostly stepped away from. The AV Club calls it his first flesh and blood action franchise hope since “The A-Team.” His blockbuster work since then, the site notes, has been largely vocal, with Rocket in “Guardians of the Galaxy” and the wider Marvel films, plus a cameo as Jor-El in James Gunn’s “Superman.” The Hollywood Reporter calls “G.I. Joe” a rare intellectual property play for an actor whose last major role was Leonard Bernstein in “Maestro,” which he also co-wrote and directed, and whose most recent film as a director was “Is This Thing On?” with Will Arnett. “American Sniper” and “The A-Team,” both military pictures, are the obvious reference points for the part.
The studio calculus is easier to read than the creative one. Deadline frames the casting as part of the slate strategy that Paramount co-chairs Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg laid out earlier this year. That push to revive the studio’s own franchises also includes a “Days of Thunder” sequel, a new “World War Z,” more “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 4” and a new “Star Trek” project. In March, Deadline reported that Paramount had passed on a satirical “G.I. Joe” treatment from Max Landis, explaining that revitalized toy sales are essential to the studio, which typically shares in the retail boost a film creates. A straight action movie with recognizable characters, in that light, was always the likelier winner.
The crossover is the part of the plan that quietly disappears. The post-credits scene of “Rise of the Beasts” showed Anthony Ramos’s Noah being handed a business card with the Joe insignia on it, and Paramount formally announced a “Transformers” and “G.I. Joe” team-up the following year, with Chris Hemsworth attached to star, as both Comics Beat and Collider recall. Comics Beat suggests Hemsworth’s unannounced role was likely another version of Duke, though that was never confirmed. Now Deadline says that film is no longer in development, and Variety reports that Paramount confirmed the new movie has been uncoupled from it, which leaves Cooper as the only Duke anyone is currently planning around.
Everything else remains unannounced, including the title, the rest of the cast and a release date. Cosmic Book News notes that the insider Daniel Richtman reported in July that Chris Pratt and Walton Goggins were being eyed alongside Cooper. Deadline does not mention either name, so those stay in the rumor column for now, even if McBride did say some pretty interesting people were lining up. The schedule is also tight, since the “Ocean’s Eleven” prequel is due in June 2027, according to Comics Beat and IGN, and IGN expects the cameras to roll on the Joes no earlier than next summer. That is a long runway, and plenty of franchise plans have stalled on shorter ones. Still, a finished script, a director with a clear idea and a star who said yes after one read is a better starting position than this property has had in years.
What Do You Think? Is Bradley Cooper the right Duke for an older, more grounded “G.I. Joe,” or would you rather see someone younger take command? Does a suspense movie set in a Cobra town sound like the fresh start this franchise needs? And who should play Shipwreck and Cobra Commander opposite him?
See you on the next binge!
