It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about Max Landis. The once-hot screenwriter of films including Chronicle and American Ultra, was basically booted from the industry when allegations surfaced against him during the #MeToo movement. He hasn’t done a movie since. Well, that’s about to change, and we have Paramount-Skydance to thank for it. Of course we do.
According to THR, Landis has been hired to write the next movie in the dormant GI Joe franchise. Along with that, Danny McBride is writing a separate GI Joe project, with both possibly being merged at a later date.
This isn’t that crazy for Paramount to attempt. It basically did the same thing with the Transformers franchise a few years ago, and tried something similar with Star Trek.
There hasn’t been a full GI Joe movie since 2013’s GI Joe: Retaliation, which was directed by Wicked‘s Jon M. Chu and led by Dwayne Johnson. A failed Snake Eyes spinoff/reboot was released in 2021. 2023’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts teased a GI Joe crossover movie, but that seems dead in the water.
Sorta like the recent news of Jonathan Majors’ upcoming movie with conservative outlet The Daily Wire, Paramount’s David Ellison has been keen on hiring “canceled” actors and filmmakers with a bone to pick against liberal Hollywood. Brett Ratner, Johnny Depp, and John Lasseter count among its number, for instance. Now you can add Landis to the mix. Landis’ most recent movie credit, 2020’s Shadow In the Cloud, starred Chloe Grace Moretz. But it was Roseanne Liang who rewrote Landis’ screenplay, turning it into a completely different movie than he intended, although he still managed to get a credit.
