Hasbro Cinematic Universe Will Team G.I. Joe, Micronauts, and More

Remember when you were a kid, and you would play with all your different toys at the same time? You’d have the Ninja Turtles team up with the Ghostbusters to take down Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior, and then they’d all get transported to the land of the Thundercats. Then the Police Academy would show up for some reason, and they’d all celebrate a hard-fought victory inside the Super Powers Hall of Justice.

Get ready for the movie adaptation of that.

The Hollywood Reporter says Hasbro and Paramount are teaming to create a cinematic universe built out of five different toy lines. The lynchpin is G.I. Joe, which already had two live-action movies starring Channing Tatum and Dwayne Johnson. Now, G.I. Joe will connect with characters from M.A.S.K. (which is basically G.I. Joe crossed with Transformers, with little action figures that control vehicles that transform), Micronauts (little robots and soldiers), ROM (a “spaceknight” who was the star of a cult Marvel comic in the 1980s), and Visionaries (which I’d completely forgotten until rewatching their cartoon intro just now, and was a fantasy property with sci-fi elements mixed in, and featured action figures with holograms on their chests which were the coolest things ever in 1987).

How all of these properties are going to fit together I have no earthly idea. That work will fall to a writers’ room that Hasbro and Paramount plan to assemble “comprised of top talent, to develop a creative roadmap” that will somehow merge soldiers, robots, aliens, and warlocks. Why not My Little Pony while they’re at it? Give the people what they want!

While this particular combination of characters sounds unwieldy and impractical, it follows two very logical lines of Hollywood thinking, one being that everyone loves combined cinematic universes these days (or, as THR calls them in their piece, a “cross-property onscreen universe“), and the other being the fact that the Transformers movies have been enormously successful all over the world, even though all four movies have been, to varying degrees, complete garbage. Now Hasbro will try to become the Marvel of toys. Truth be told, I’m kinda jazzed about a M.A.S.K. movie. I loved those things as a kid.