Apparently the forces of the box office can’t keep a good Joe down.

G.I. Joe sequel in the works

Paramount Studios’ vice chairman Rob Moore has told the LA Times that a sequel to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is about to go into development.

The cast have all inked deals that require them to appear in the next film, though director Stephen Sommers, who previously was able to launch The Mummy as a franchise, has no such provision in his contract.

No word yet on what the premise of the sequel will be. But as the first movie deals with the rise of Cobra, the organization that stood in opposition to the Joes in both the wildly popular animated show of the 1980s and the related comic book series, there are plenty of possibilities.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra raked in approximately $100 million dollars worldwide over its opening weekend, even though it has yet to open in other key foreign markets, like Germany and Italy.

Source: http://scifiwire.com/2009/08/gi-joe-sequel-in-the-work.php

The results from this weekend are in!  According to BoxOfficeMojo.com:

Weekend Report: ‘G.I. Joe’ Doesn’t Roll Snake Eyes
by Brandon Gray

August 9, 2009

The summer’s last would-be event picture, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, wielded its kung fu grip on the box office over the weekend, though it wasn’t quite a real blockbuster hero. With a big movie opening, the weekend as a whole was up 22 percent over the same timeframe last year, when The Dark Knight led for the fourth weekend in a row and Pineapple Express debuted in second. Compared to previous years, though, weekend attendance was middling.

G.I. Joe enlisted an estimated $56.2 million on approximately 5,900 screens at 4,007 sites, ranking as the fourth highest-grossing August opening ever, but a far cry from its Hasbro toyline stable mate, Transformers. Joe‘s estimated attendance was nearly identical to XXX, another action spectacle that opened on the same August weekend in 2002, and it was slightly higher than similar pictures like Mission: Impossible III and Wanted but less than the Fantastic Four movies. Despite the sizable launches, none of those pictures attained true blockbuster status, and Joe would need to be unusually flinty to break the trend. Distributor Paramount Pictures’ exit polling indicated that 60 percent of the audience was male and 50 percent was under 25 years old.

While riding on the 1980s toy-cartoon-comic brand name and attempting to cash in on some of the disaster thriller appeal of Transformers with the destruction of the Eiffel Tower, the marketing for G.I. Joe mostly resembled XXX and other movies with its clearly computer-generated action set-pieces, such as the brand’s most popular character, Snake Eyes, leaping over cars a la Spider-Man. Much of the focus was on The Rise of Cobra (on the movie poster, the bad guys are featured at the top, while the Joes are below the credits), which was a bit cockeyed considering that G.I. Joe itself had yet to be established as a movie franchise. That lack of central heroic characters for audiences to get behind may have limited the appeal. Curiously, though Paramount publicly eschewed advanced screenings for movie reviewers, they mysteriously presented reviewer quotes as the centerpiece of their television ads. Such dogmatic (and, in this case, hypocritical) adherence to critic’s quotes only comes at the expense of what audiences truly care about: the story, the characters, the spectacle, etc. Continue reading →