By Michael Janusonis
Journal Arts WriterG.I. Joe, the action figure created by Pawtucket’s Hasbro toy company, has had two incarnations since his debut on the world stage in 1964, plus animated TV shows and comic books. And now, 45 years after he became a household name, there is the live-action feature film G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra which will have its North American premiere Monday night at the Showcase in Warwick in a benefit performance for Hasbro Children’s Hospital and the Bradley Hospital with director Stephen Sommers and star Rachel Nichols in the audience.
The film, which stars Dennis Quaid as General Hawk, Channing Tatum, and Jonathan Pryce as the U.S. president, will have a Hollywood premiere Thursday night before opening nationwide Friday.
That’s a lot of excitement for a guy who only stands 3¾ inches tall.
Monday night’s sold-out premiere is certain to be a thrill, especially for those in the audience whose childhood play revolved around designing maneuvers for G.I. Joe. Yet all this had the potential for happening a half decade ago.
That’s when independent Hollywood producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura approached Hasbro president and CEO Brian Goldner with the idea of making a live-action film based on the popular G.I. Joe line of action figures. Di Bonaventura was once the president of worldwide production at Warner Bros. where he shepherded The Matrix before the cameras before leaving to strike out on his own. But plans for G.I. Joe were put on hold while other films were put into the pipeline by di Bonaventura, who is now affiliated with Paramount Pictures. They include the 2007 Transformers movie, which earned more than $700 million and reignited Hasbro’s Transformers toy line, and this summer’s smash sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. That film has already earned more than $780 million and still counting, according to Wayne Charness, senior vice president of corporate communications and public relations at Hasbro.
Charness has seen the G.I. Joe movie a couple of times already, showing it to retailers and licensers at trade shows where it has been screened from Europe to Shanghai. He was on the set of the movie while it was in production in Hollywood and in Prague as well.
Before all that, Charness and his staff had also organized what he calls “G.I. Joe School” for the filmmakers and screenwriters Stuart Beattie and David Elliot at Hasbro’s Pawtucket headquarters. Hasbro wanted them to be immersed in the G.I. Joe mythology to make sure that the film would not disappoint fans with a script that had little to do with the background story of their favorite action hero.
Originally, Charness explained, G.I. Joe was a 12-inch-tall figure that represented the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. “But in 1977, the figures associated with Star Wars redefined the size of action figures. So when we came out with a new G.I. Joe line in 1982 he was 3 inches tall and was now based on an elite fighting force.” The good-guy G.I. Joes were in a constant international struggle with the mysterious and evil Cobra organization.
The movie that the audience will see Monday night in Warwick is about the birth of Cobra, led by corrupt arms dealer Destro, and the attempts by the G.I. Joe team, employing the latest in spy and military equipment in their battles, to prevent Cobra’s aim of worldwide chaos. The action ranges from the Egyptian desert to deep below the polar ice caps. In the film Dennis Quaid’s General Hawk explains the G.I. Joe motto as “When everyone else fails, we don’t.”
The 47-year-old Sommers was hired because it was felt he had a good background in creating an action film that also had strong characters, demonstrated by his work on the hit films The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. His next film is a remake of the ultimate catastrophe movie When Worlds Collide. Nichols plays the distaff member of the G.I. Joe team, Shana “Scarlett” O’Hara. A Maine native, earlier this summer she had a role in the hit Star Trek movie.
Hasbro Children’s Hospital and Bradley Hospital, the nation’s first psychiatric hospital devoted exclusively to children and adolescents, were naturals for Monday’s $75-per-person movie premiere. Charness said the toy company wanted “to give back to the people most responsible for our success — the children.” All of the festivities associated with the premiere, including a pre-show party in the theater lobby, are being underwritten by Hasbro, with 100 percent of the ticket price going to the hospitals.
Charness promised that moviegoers will get their money’s worth. “At the end of the day,” he said, “the best thing is it’s a fun summer popcorn movie.”
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