Stephen Sommers Spent $175 Million Teaching Studios Nothing

Bradley Cooper will play Duke, the field commander of G. I. Joe, in a reboot directed by Danny McBride — a pairing that contains a structural contradiction so reliable it has its own graveyard of failed films behind it. The studio knows this.

McBride is a comedian who has directed funny action movies. Cooper is a dramatic actor with the salary of a leading man, yet G. Joe is an action franchise that was already dying when Stephen Sommers took it over in 2009.

Sommers directed The Mummy, a film that treated its own premise as a joke worth sharing with the audience. He applied that wink to G. Joe, hired comic actors. Produced Rise of Cobra, which lost money on a $175 million budget because the core audience — people who loved the original cartoons and the property as a straightforward military power fantasy. Did not want irony. They wanted competence and stakes, not a director diagnosing the franchise's problem as "tone" when the actual problem was that the audience had moved on and the studio had spent a fortune trying to make them laugh about something they wanted to take seriously.

McBride's casting announces the studio is repeating this exact error. A-list action directors cost money. A-list action stars cost money, but if you hire a comedy director and pair him with an actor whose dramatic credibility lets audiences pretend the tone shift is intentional rather than budgetary, you get to rebrand the franchise as something new without admitting it failed. This is how studios rationalize retreating. They call it reinvention.

This is how studios rationalize retreating.

The one variable that might save this is if McBride actually understands something Sommers did not. That comedy and action are not genres that blend smoothly but genres that need each other. The air traffic controller knows that every joke is a moment of inattention, and inattention in the cockpit kills. Comedy requires a character doing something sincere in a context that renders it absurd. McBride could make a military action film where the humor comes not from the premise being mocked but from people trying to execute a premise with dignity in a situation designed to strip it away. Whether he attempts it will become clear the moment Cooper's character faces an actual choice with actual weight.