Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura recently revealed that Paramount and studio executives already rejected a sequel pitch.
In a wide-ranging interview with Uproxx, di Bonaventura was asked, “If you got your way, what would you want the next chapter to be? Not of Snake Eyes, but just the next time you see G.I. Joe in general as a movie?”
In response he revealed a draft that was already rejected.
Di Bonaventura stated, “It’s funny, there’s 10 pages of one draft that got the tone exactly where I thought it should be. And I gave it to every director and every writer, and then they rejected it.”
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When pressed for more details he added, “The short version of it it was, one of the Joes is taken. The command says, “Nothing we could do.” Four or five of them band to say, “All right, we’re taking our leave.” They dress up in civies. And they go into a territory, let’s call it…”
Uproxx’s Mike Ryan interjects and says, “Val Verde.”
Di Bonaventura continues, “[Laughs] There you go, Val Verde, right. An environment in South America, the three borders, do you know what I’m thinking of? A triple frontier?”
He then detailed, “The scene is they arrive, they have no money. They walk into a police station. They look at the most wanted posters on the wall. The police, the captain says, “What are you doing?” And they go, “Well, we’ll be back. We’re going to get this guy.” And our guys are smart enough.”
“They’ve tapped into the phone line. So now they know where this wanted guy is and then there’s a hard cut. The end of the day, they walk in, they’ve got their guy and the police captain is like, ‘What?’ So it’s clever. It’s fun. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it shows great competence actually. And it doesn’t require firepower to show the ingenuity of the team,” he concluded.
While di Bonaventura revealed this rejected script, he would also detail that there are a number of other G.I. Joe projects in developments.
He explained, “There’s a couple things we have in development right now for G.I. Joe, which is not really origin stories. It is and it isn’t.”
He then went into detail on one of them, “But what is interesting is it takes a G.I. Joe and essentially brands him a traitor, and then the story is, how does he prove he’s not? And what I liked about that idea was how personal it was.”
The producer also noted that he’s opposed to the idea of planning a G.I. Joe universe. He said, “I’m a little antithetical to this idea of planning the universe. I find there’s a certain rigidity to that, that doesn’t appeal to me at all.”
He would go on to state that actor Henry Golding who plays Snake Eyes would eventually wear his iconic mask and not speak in future films if they are ever made. di Bonaventura declared, “Yeah. I would think so. Yeah, for sure.”
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In fact, di Bonaventura explained that they would also show how Snake Eyes would lose his voice, noting that it most likely would have been in a third film.
He said, “I think you want to get to that place where you see the helicopter crash – and we’ll pick a more modern war and see that transformation. I don’t know where, but I guess if we’re successful enough and I don’t know how to measure success right now, that’s what’s so tricky. I would have guessed that in the third movie, that’s when we would have done that.
What do you make of di Bonaventura’s revelation that a sequel pitch was already rejected? What about his idea for the G.I. Joe film that is development?