Jude 2

And while I can’t verify the story, I have heard several really bad things about the film from a few informed sources. Common word is that it is a disaster for Paramount, and that a lot of unplanned post-production work was done to amp up the action and excitement factors and possibly just to make the thing watchable. Details of the original post from Murphy’s message board after the jump.

The condensed version goes like this: A disastrous test screening led production exec Brad Weston to push for Sommers’ firing. Stuart Baird was brought in to rework the edit, while producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura was also let go from the project. (di Bonaventura getting the boot seems unlikely.) There’s a lot of talk in the post about how di Bonaventura and Sommers didn’t know anything about ‘the mythology’ and how that led (somehow) to the ruin of the film. The ‘didn’t know the mythology’ argument seems like a fanboy straw man as the issue doesn’t seem to be that the movie is bad by GI Joe standards, but by any standard. Jeff Wells quotes an unnamed source that says Sommers “was given total freedom but he melted down and has made the biggest bomb in many a moon.” Again, not a bad GI Joe movie, but a bad movie, period.