Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are probably having the best week ever right about now. Having penned the fall hit Zombieland (which got a Metacritic rating of 73 and a Certified Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes), earlier this week it was revealed that they had officially signed on to pen Deadpool for 20th Century Fox.
But why stop with one Marvel Comics character when you can write the screenplay for another tentpole project?
In August 2009, Paramount’s Vice Chairman Rob Moore said a sequel to G.I. Joe would be going in to development soon. But he did not comment on if writers had been hired or if Stephen Sommers would be back directing. Yesterday, Collider had a report about a screenwriter being hired to pen the sequel.
Turns out the site was half right. It’s actually going to take two writers to tackle the project and those writers are Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick!
So they get to write dialogue for the “Merc with a Mouth” and capitalize on writing a sequel that wasn’t screened for critics. That’s right. Paramount decided not the screen G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra for critics. I guess it worked because it still made $301 million worldwide (though production costs were in the range of $170 million).
IESB learned yesterday of that Reese and Wernick got the scripting duties for the sequel.
Sounds like a good announcement to me. The two couldn’t possibly make the G.I. Joe franchise any worse by writing a sequel, right? Maybe now the G.I. Joes will nut up and take care of business. I tell people if I had seen Rise of Cobra before Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, I probably would have hated it a lot. But because Michael Bay’s overbloated sequel left a bad taste in my mouth, I was still able to stomach it. (Thanks to Sienna Miller and Rachel Nichols, oh and Ray Park as Snake Eyes.)
So was this a good hiring on Paramount’s part? I’m thinking yes, but who knows how much of their screenplay will be poked and prodded before it goes into production.
