Yo Joe! Paramount Pictures has officially found the architect tasked with cleaning up the fractured pieces of one of its most valuable legacy sandbox brands. While the internet spent the last two years assuming the franchise would lean directly into a multi-studio Transformers crossover machine, the studio has quietly built out a completely separate, highly distinct standalone runway.
While talking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Danny McBride (The Righteous Gemstones, Eastbound & Down) has officially completed the screenplay for a full, ground-up G.I. Joe theatrical reboot.
With Paramount heavily backing his narrative vision, McBride confirmed that the project is targeting a concrete 2027 production window.
“I’ve written one, yes. I’m stoked about it. I’m really fired up about the script,” McBride revealed to host Horowitz. “Paramount seems fired up about it, so hopefully we’re shooting it next year.”
Ditching the Punchlines for Suspense
Given McBride’s extensive comedy pedigree alongside frequent collaborators Jeff Fradley and John Carcieri—who co-wrote the treatment with him—fans immediately expected a tongue-in-cheek, 21 Jump Street-style parody. However, McBride explicitly clarified that his script treats the military IP with absolute narrative sincerity.
The reboot is being explicitly structured as a high-stakes, hard-hitting action-suspense thriller rather than a comedy. “We cracked something that we really love,” McBride shared. “It’s not a comedy, it’s like a kind of suspense and action, it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
The Plot: Infiltrating the Town of Springfield
Instead of relying on abstract, CGI-heavy sky lasers or international submarine bases like The Rise of Cobra, McBride is drawing pure, direct inspiration from Larry Hama’s legendary Marvel G.I. Joe comic run and the classic 1980s animated universe.
The narrative is officially confirmed to track Duke leading a tightly knit, elite squad of Joes.
“You’re following Duke and a group of other Joes. There’s that town in the comics, Springfield, which is a town that’s secretly all Cobra. That is where our film takes place,” McBride said, adding, “We have some pretty interesting people lining up to be in it, too. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it looks like it’s going to be pretty fun.”
While McBride refused to leak specific talent signatures, he teased that major stars are already circling the board: “We have some pretty interesting people lining up to be in it… it looks like it’s going to be pretty fun.” With a 2027 shoot locked, expect formal character sheets to slide down the wire by Late 2026.
Wait, those aren’t Dreadnoks…they’re G.I. Joes
The road to Springfield took a highly unusual creative detour. McBride revealed that he originally approached Paramount with zero intention of writing a mainline G.I. Joe film. As a massive childhood obsessive of the action figures, his dream was to make a standalone, Mad Max-style outlaw movie centering entirely around The Dreadnoks—the swamp-dwelling, leather-jacketed biker mercenaries frequently hired by Cobra Commander.
While Paramount was instantly hooked by his voice, they pushed him to scale up the architecture and lay the groundwork for a potential franchise with a G.I. Joe film first. The studio rejected a competing, parallel script treatment from Max Landis and handed the keys to the entire mainline universe over to McBride’s table.
Paramount has spent a decade trying to turn G.I. Joe into a glossy, high-tech counterpart to Transformers, and it failed to stick the landing every single time. By bringing in an authentic, lifelong superfan like McBride to strip away the synthetic bloat and focus entirely on a paranoid, street-level infiltration of a secret COBRA town, the studio is prioritizing character and tension over raw corporate infrastructure. It is exactly the type of grounded, identity-first storytelling the franchise needs to finally build a sustainable theatrical footprint.
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