They say that boys love their toys, but at Paramount they love their toy franchises. Their partnership with Hasbro has led to billions of dollars in box office and merchandising from the Transformers films, and there will be a lot more after Akiva Goldsman's "Writers Room" cooked up ideas for multiple sequels and spinoffs. Now Paramount wants Goldsman to do the same for G.I. Joe and Micronauts.
Goldsman had been tasked with writing Transformers 5 but he'll take on this new duty full-time, apparently, and will instead just oversee the next film which is expected to arrive in 2017 with Michael Bay at the helm. Art Marcum & Matt Holloway (Iron Man) and Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down) are working on the screenplay together now. As for G.I. Joe, Goldsman is jumping into a franchise that has had two movies already, the latest one being 2013's G.I. Joe: Retaliation with Dwayne Johnson, Channing Tatum, and Bruce Willis. A third film has been in the works since, most recently adding D.J. Caruso (I Am Number Four) as director, but it's unclear if Goldsman plans to start the whole process over. Could we be looking at a reboot rather than a sequel? And would they be able to convince Johnson to gear up as Roadblock one more time?
As for Micronauts, it's another toy line of action figures that was popular in the '70s and '80s, enough that Marvel had a comic book for it. Then again, Marvel had a comic book for just about every toy. Anyway, the story for them centers on aliens that arrived here on Earth and disguised themselves as toys. So basically they aren't too much different from the Transformers. [Deadline]
