G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Development began in 2003 when producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, hunting for a film about advanced military technology, took a call from Hasbro's Brian Goldner suggesting the G.I. Joe toy line. Producer Don Murphy had been circling the property first, but when the Iraq War broke out he judged a G.I. Joe movie ill-timed and steered toward Transformers instead.

The script churned through several hands. Michael B. Gordon wrote an early draft, Paul Lovett and David Elliot mutated a new character named Rex into Cobra Commander, and Skip Woods produced a much-altered version that leaked online and drew fan anger for sidelining Cobra. In August 2007 Paramount hired Stephen Sommers, brought in Stuart Beattie to write a fresh script, and signed G.I. Joe comics architect Larry Hama as creative consultant to pull it back toward the source.

The most contentious creative decision was recasting G.I. Joe from an American unit into a Brussels-based multinational force whose name now stood for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity. The change was a direct response to the era's geopolitics. Di Bonaventura framed it bluntly, saying the climate made an American-branded G.I. Joe a hard global sell, and the European marketing leaned on the team being international operatives rather than American soldiers.

Fans revolted, and Hasbro publicly reassured them it was not changing the brand, insisting the name still stood for bravery and heroism and that the film was a modern telling of G.I. Joe versus Cobra, run out of the Pit just as in the 1980s comics.

Fresh off The Mummy films and Van Helsing, Sommers brought a maximalist, effects-forward sensibility with little interest in restraint. The film piles on powered exo-suits, swarming nanotech, underwater fortresses and globe-trotting set pieces, treating the toy line's sprawl as a feature rather than a problem.

The result is an origin story that tries to introduce the Joes, the rise of Cobra and the central rivalries all at once, a density that thrilled longtime fans even as it bewildered newcomers.

Cobra Commander's iconic comic hood never made the screen. The crew found the classic design too reminiscent of Ku Klux Klan imagery and deliberately redesigned it, putting Gordon-Levitt in prosthetic makeup beneath a very different breathing mask. The choice frustrated purists but reflected a recurring tension in the film, modernizing instantly recognizable toy and comic designs for a live-action audience.

Principal photography began in February 2008 in Los Angeles, where a Downey soundstage housed the first levels of the Pit, Destro's Arctic MARS base, an ex-Soviet weapons factory and submarine interiors. The production then moved to Prague's Barrandov Studios for roughly a month, taking over parts of the Old Town, with second-unit work in Paris, Egypt, Tokyo, the Arctic and underwater.

Because so much of the hardware was fictional, US military cooperation was limited. The filmmakers were initially denied access to MRAP armored vehicles, then later allowed to film them at Fort Irwin's National Training Center.

Contrary to a common assumption, Industrial Light and Magic did not lead the effects. Six houses split the work, with Digital Domain in front on roughly 320 shots including the Paris chase, the opening convoy ambush and the Eiffel Tower collapse. The Moving Picture Company handled the underwater climax, building a full 3D polar base, ships and attack subs across some 176 shots.

The Eiffel Tower destruction needed custom software to simulate the crumbling metal. The digital tower was rebuilt from the original plans and grew so complex it could not fit in a single computer file, with the green nanomites and debris driven by a particle system.

In an unusual move for a summer tentpole, Paramount declined to screen the film for print and broadcast critics, focusing instead on internet reviewers. Paramount vice chairman Rob Moore explained it as a deliberate strategy, citing the gulf between critics and audiences on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and saying the studio wanted audiences, not reviewers, to define the movie.

The press framed it as a studio bracing for a critical drubbing, and the term critic-proof followed the film into release.

As a film built on a toy line, The Rise of Cobra is wall to wall with hardware. The Joes field the Delta-6 Accelerator Suits, the submersible S.H.A.R.C., the Rockslide A.T.A.V. and the Ice Sabre that Snake Eyes uses to down the first warhead. Cobra and MARS counter with the Night Raven prototype jet, the Mantis attack craft, a Mole Pod that burrows under the Pit, the Steel Crusher A.P.V. and a fleet of submarines for the polar climax.

The film mixes that fiction with real military steel. The US Army supplied an AH-64 Apache and crews for the opening ambush, and the production filmed MRAP armored vehicles at Fort Irwin after the Pentagon, which had prioritized them for combat deployment, initially turned the request down. The accelerator suits themselves carry triple heat-seeking rockets and a 10mm caseless Gatling gun rated at fifty rounds a second.

Stephen Sommers reunited with composer Alan Silvestri, who scored the film with a ninety-piece Hollywood Studio Symphony. Varese Sarabande released the soundtrack on August 4, 2009, twenty-one tracks running over seventy minutes, anchored by the seven-minute centerpiece Delivering the Warheads.

Reviewers found the synth-heavy first half thin but praised the orchestral surge of the second, from Who Are You onward, where Silvestri leans into full brass and the King Cobra theme. It is the rare element of the production that drew broad agreement as a strength.

Electronic Arts launched its first game under the newly won Hasbro license three days before the film, on August 4, 2009, developed by Double Helix Games. Crucially, the story is set after the movie rather than retelling it, a third-person co-op shooter with Commando, Heavy Weapons and Soldier classes and a Yo Joe power-up that triggers accelerator-suit invulnerability.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the only film actor to reprise his role, voicing Cobra Commander, and the game added deep-cut characters the movie left out, including Gung-Ho, Shipwreck and the newly created Agent Helix. Critics were unkind, with a Metacritic 44 and a one-star X-Play review calling it a new gold standard for lazy licensed cash-ins.

Paramount and Hasbro sold the film hard and strange. Hasbro scanned the actors for a 3.75-inch figure line that launched in July 2009, including the first ever Pit playset in franchise history, and dropped more than three hundred parachute-rigged G.I. Joe figures from the roof of a forty-two story Kansas City hotel at the annual fan convention.

Black helicopters marked G.I. Joe buzzed American beaches, tie-ins ran with Burger King, 7-Eleven and Norton, and a two-part viral short called The Invasion of Cobra Island spoofed Thunderbirds with vintage Hasbro vehicles and custom puppetry. The film even shot under the fake working title Dark Sky: First Strike to keep a lid on it.

Longtime fans met the film with suspicion, and the changes ran deep. G.I. Joe was reframed as a Brussels-based international force, the Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, before Hasbro publicly walked the acronym back and confirmed the team would still be Pit-based. MARS, the Military Armaments Research Syndicate, was positioned as the proto-Cobra, binding Destro, Cobra Commander and the Baroness together through the invented Lewis-sibling backstory.

The Baroness was the lightning rod, recast from an Eastern European noble into Duke's brainwashed ex-girlfriend. An early Skip Woods draft had gone further still, nearly dropping the Cobra organization altogether in favor of a crooked CIA agent and an Action Man character married to Scarlett. Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura framed the reinvention as moving from the 1989 Batman to Batman Begins.

For all its liberties, the film is studded with deep-cut nods. Duke's facial scar honors the original 1964 twelve-inch figure, where the scar was a copyright mark against bootlegs. The Eiffel Tower's destruction echoes the very first Real American Hero cartoon episode, in which Cobra makes the tower vanish, and the Neo-Viper nanomite injections leave a scar shaped like the classic Cobra sigil.

The closing aircraft carrier is the U.S.S. Flagg, hull number ninety-nine, matching the toy and comic. The Delta-6 suits nod to Sigma 6, whose logo appears in the end credits, and the pulse cannon firing on the submarine reuses the program de-resolution sound from Tron. Larry Hama, who wrote most of the original filecards, appears as a NATO general in the briefing scene.

The Rise of Cobra proved the brand could open a global tentpole and established the visual language of the live-action Joes, the accelerator suits, the ninja duels and Cobra's rise. Its mixed reception, though, triggered a hard reset.

Jon M. Chu's 2013 sequel Retaliation killed Duke off in its opening act, brought in Dwayne Johnson's Roadblock, recast Cobra Commander and sidelined Destro, keeping only Ray Park's Snake Eyes and Byung-hun Lee's Storm Shadow. A 2021 reboot, Snake Eyes, later restarted the continuity entirely. Through all of it, the 2009 film remains where the live-action Joes began.