Paramount is staking out four dates for upcoming films that the studio will be producing in conjunction with toy maker Hasbro, based on some of the company’s iconic toy lines.
The biggest title is the first on the calendar, a rebooted GI Joe which will hit theaters on March 27, 2020. That will be followed seven months later by Micronauts on October 16, 2020. The following year will see Dungeons & Dragons arriving in theaters on July 23 with an untitled film penciled in for October 1, 2021.
In 2015, Paramount and Hasbro announced a joint initiative to bring a number of the toy maker’s popular brands to the big screen, starting with a reboot of the GI Joe films. The plan included setting up a cinematic universe consisting of a number of these properties including GI Joe, Micronauts, Rom, Visionaires and MASK. To that end the studio set up a writer’s room to flesh out a number of story elements for these films. With Akiva Goldsman supervising, the writers room included Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, Eisner Award winning comics writer Brian K. Vaughan, Nicole Perlman, who wrote Marvel Studios’ Guardians Of The Galaxy and the upcoming Captain Marvel and Cheo Coker, showrunner of Marvel’s Netflix show Luke Cage.
Previously, Paramount produced two GI Joe live-actions films with Hasbro – 2009’s GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra and 2013’s GI Joe: Retaliation. The first film was hampered by a script that needed a few more drafts but was rushed into production at the beginning of the writers guild strike in December 2007. The sequel was only marginally better, but still not that good. The pair have also co-produced the Transformers franchise, which while not proving to be hits with critics, have managed to earn nearly $4.4 billion at the worldwide box office.
