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 →

This just hit my Facebook account and I thought it was worth sharing:

Artist on Artist with Channing Tatum and Sienna Miller

‘G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra’ stars Channing Tatum and Sienna Miller tell us their funniest, most action-packed moments from the set, including the time Channing dropped sienna on the ground!

RottenTomatoes.com

Sure, we’re jumping the gun with only a few registered reviews posted but surprisingly enough, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is currently at 91% positive at RottenTomatoes.com.  This number is sure to fluctuate as more contributors see the film but the comments on the site seem to bode well for the film’s box office.  Here are a few of the more interesting comments thus far:

• G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra’ is… a summer movie, through and through, pure pulp preposterousness, one of the most successful little-boy adventure movies in a long time.
• Pure escapist fun.
• Stephen Sommers’ film captures the silly energy that made the series such a childhood favorite and finds a way to fulfill the expectations of fanboys from 13 to 30 (okay, 33) in the process.
• If I was 10 years old, GI Joe would be one of the best movies I had ever seen. As a grown up it’s one of the better summer movies; a delightfully light, fun and action-packed kick in the ass.

Love it or hate it, we’ll all find out on Friday!

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Ben Fritz, a reporter for the LA Times, conducted an interview with Larry Hama about his involvement as “creative consultant” for the Rise of Cobra feature film.

Snake Eyes TALKING? ‘G.I. Joe’ creator Larry Hama fought against the idea

11:43 AM PT, Aug 4 2009

Ben Fritz, who covers the business of Hollywood for the Los Angeles Times, caught up with Larry Hama, the creator of the “G.I. Joe” commando team mythology, and put together this interesting Hero Complex report on “the real American hero” as a film property….

On Friday, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” opens and fanboys have some reason to be nervous. Though Aint-It-Cool’s Harry Knowles gave it a good review, Paramounthasn’t exactly embraced devotees of the toys and ’80s cartoon.

Fred Meyer, owner of the website JoeBattleLines.com, said he was one of several fan community leaders invited to a meeting by Paramount and Hasbro at a G.I. Joe fan convention two years ago to discuss what they wanted to see in the film.

“That was the last time we had any involvement,” he noted. “They’re not taking advantage of the fact that they have this free army of PR people out there.”

Perhaps more notably, Paramount didn’t bring the movie to Comic-Con International, even though there was a panel for Hasbro’s new toy line based on the movie. The movie’s producer was rather blunt when asked about the decision.

“You can never win with those guys,” Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, producer of both “Transformers” films and “G.I. Joe,” said of the San Diego convention. “They feel they’re the keepers of the fanboys flag and have a deep childhood association with many of these properties. And we know the hard-core fans are already coming to see the movie.”

As my story in The Times business section explained, Paramount has a different agenda with the new “G.I. Joe” film. It’s aggressively marketing the film to military, blue collar and red state audiences. In fact, the movie’s premiere on Friday wasn’t in Hollywood or New York, but at Andrews Air Force Base, the home of Air Force One.

All hope isn’t lost for old school G.I. Joe fans, however. The studio hired as a consultant a man who’s very familiar to them: Larry Hama, the writer of the comic books that originated the “Real American Hero” revival of the brand in the 1980s. Hama also wrote the file cards that came with the ’80s toy line and gave shape to the characters who populated the after-school cartoon and, in somewhat different form, the new movie.

I interviewed Hama for the story and, while we managed to fit only one quote in the piece, saved the best of the rest for Hero Complex readers.

Continue reading →