Paramount Hires Max Landis for G.I. Joe Movie

Max Landis, remember him? Son of John Landis? Writer of Chronicle, Bright, and that 150-page essay mansplaining Carly Rae Jepsen? Accused of emotional and sexual abuse by eight women in 2019? Yeah, him. He’s doing a G.I. Joe movie. According to The Hollywood Reporter, David Ellison’s Paramount has commissioned a relaunch of G.I. Joe from Landis. At the same time, it has asked for one from Danny McBride. Rather than a somewhat normal for Hollywood bakeoff, Paramount plans to kind of smush the two scripts together into one IP chimera. “According to several sources, the studio will then try to blend the two scripts into one, but a studio source says that these are to be separate projects,” THR says. Kind of like when you take the head off one G.I. Joe doll and put it on the body of another.

This is the first big gig for Landis since 2020, when he was taken off Shadow in the Cloud because of the sexual-assault allegations. Eight women spoke to The Daily Beast accusing him of emotional and physical abuse and sexual assault. “He sees something shiny and he wants it. He’s like, I have to have it,” one said. “He would systematically try to have sex with all the women I knew. We’re not people to him.” In August 2021, Landis wrote an essay titled “Why I Never Responded to My Public Shaming,” claiming the accusations against him were a “somewhat corrupt enterprise.”