Yo, Joe.
You can’t have a G.I. Joe movie without team leader Duke, and according to Deadline, the upcoming franchise reboot has found the man for the job. That would be Bradley Cooper, who is reportedly set to star in the new Joe, which is directed and written by The Righteous Gemstones star (and Halloween legacyquel producer and co-writer) Danny McBride.
Their report contains zero details about McBride’s take on the G.I. Joe concept, which is based on the long-running toy line from Hasbro. The only concrete tidbit about the film is that it is “uncoupled from a previous crossover film with Transformers that is no longer in development.”
That was the movie that was teased in the post-credits scene of the most recent live-action Transformers movie, 2023’s Rise of the Beasts, when that movie’s human hero, played by Anthony Ramos, was recruited into the membership of G.I. Joe.
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Whatever it is, McBride’s G.I. Joe will be divorced from the previous batch of live-action Joe movies. In that iteration, Duke was played by Channing Tatum, who starred in 2009’s The Rise of Cobra, and then played a supporting role in 2013’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation (where, uh, spoiler alert, Duke got killed off in a Cobra attack). The third and final film in that G.I. Joe cycle, Snake Eyes, was a prequel and did not feature that character.
Unless you count his voice role as Rocket in Guardians of the Galaxy, Cooper has not done many action movies on the scale of G.I. Joe. He did star as Face in the big-screen version of The A-Team from 2010, but otherwise, he’s generally tended to stick to more grounded comedies and dramas. But … he kinda looks like a Duke type, right?
McBride’s G.I. Joe doesn’t have a release date yet.
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