Once upon a time G.I. Joe: Retaliation was going to be a centerpiece of summer 2012, picking up from the mediocre start of G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra and giving the franchise new life by bringing in big names like The Rock and Bruce Willis. There were trailers, posters, toy lines, everything-- until Paramount decided at the last minute to shift the movie's release by more than 9 months, scheduling it for March 29, 2013.
Though they never admitted it, it wasn't hard to guess their reason. All signs pointed to Rise of Cobra star Channing Tatum being killed off early in the film, apparently at his own request-- Tatum knew his career was going places and he didn't want to be shackled to this franchise. The producers allowed it, but then early in 2012 it was clear that the double whammy of The Vow and 21 Jump Street had made Tatum far too big a star to kill off. Tatum went back in for reshoots, the movie was recut, and now you just have to take a look at the film's brand-new poster to realize he's a much bigger part in it than. Take a look at the new one-sheet below, via Yahoo!:
This is your basic nightmare of a pile of Photoshopped people, with the most famous people literally the largest on the poster, and poor Adrianne Palicki hovering in her tiny little corner, wondering how she's being so neglected. Obviously if they're reintroducing the fact that Channing Tatum is actually in this they need to cram him in among all the other faces, but wasn't there a more elegant way to do this? Bruce Willis looks like he's been copied and pasted from the Expendables 2 poster, for God's sake.
With Jon M. Chu behind the camera, after making the surprisingly fun Justin Bieber concert film Never Say Never, I'm still interested in G.I. Joe: Retaliation-- provided it's not the Frankenstein of action movie cliches this poster seems to be promising.
