Is Josh Duhamel playing Duke?

It was inevitable on the heels of the success of "Transformers" but a movie adaptation of 80's toy and cartoon mainstays “G.I. Joe” has been green-lit into development. While the property has floated in movie development limbo for decades, the success of “Transformers” helped push G.I. Joe up the movie development priority list. There is also a "Transformers" sequel in the works; no word on "Thundercats", "He-Man", or "M.A.S.K.", but I'm sure proposals are floating around out there already.

Variety reports that Stephen Sommers (The Mummy) will direct the live-action film version of G.I. Joe, which is due in theaters in 2009.

While “G.I. Joe” served several futile tours of duty as a movie property, its momentum has been helped by “Transformers,” the movie transfer of another Hasbro brand. That di Bonaventura-produced film has grossed $667 million worldwide for studio partners DreamWorks and Paramount.

Hasbro’s Goldner said that the mythology of G.I Joe was fleshed out during the 1980s through 155 issues of Marvel Comics, as well as an animated TV series. There are about 30 core characters, good and evil, that can be exploited in films.

“Marrying Steve’s vision with 25 years of this brand mythology feels like a great way to go forward,” Goldner said.

(Variety, by way of Newsarama Blog)

One popular rumor is that we'd see the Joes working alongside a British officer, played by Jason Stantham, whose methods conflict with the American army team.

So who’d you like to see in it, both character and actor-wise? I figure you have to have at least Duke, Snake-Eyes, Roadblock, and Scarlet. Maybe you populate the movie with other characters in the background who are fan favourites, like in the X-Men movies, so you get all the fanboys going "Dude, that's totally Recondo in the top left corner of the screen".

Odd thought: one of the challenges to the film would be in playing the masked characters. Several of the most popular main characters in the series wear full masks: Destro, Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow, Cobra Commander. And actors find it difficult to act when they have a full mask obscuring their features. The Spider-Man franchise avoided this by having Spider-Man lose or shred his mask every 5 minutes, but I don’t think it would work here.

Toss your actor/character wish lists into the comment section.

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