Max Landis is back. Paramount has hired the screenwriter to develop a treatment for a new G.I. Joe film, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed Friday.
It is his first major studio assignment since his career imploded in 2019 after multiple women accused him of sexual and emotional abuse.
Landis seemingly acknowledged the news himself. He posted a screenshot on Instagram Stories of Oscar Isaac’s character in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker saying “Somehow…”
What Happened To Max Landis?
In 2019, The Daily Beast published an investigation by reporter Melissa Leon that included accounts from eight women describing a pattern of behavior spanning years.
The accusations included sexual assault, physical abuse, and sustained psychological manipulation. Multiple women described being isolated from friends and family. Several described coercive sexual encounters. One accuser alleged Landis had choked her during sex without consent.
CAA dropped him the same week the article published. MGM shelved Deeper, a thriller he had written.
His last Hollywood credit became the 2020 war horror film Shadow in the Cloud, a script he had written before the controversy that was rewritten without his involvement by director Roseanne Liang, though he retained a credit.
No criminal charges were ever filed against Landis.
In the years since, he maintained an active YouTube channel and directed several fan films based on DC Comics.
What Is The G.I. Joe Project?
Paramount has also hired Danny McBride, creator and star of HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, to write a completely separate G.I. Joe script at the same time.
The studio’s reported plan is to take both finished treatments and attempt to blend them into a single film, though sources are split on whether that is actually the intention.
McBride runs toward dark absurdist comedy. Landis has always written with a superhero obsession that runs deep and specific.
Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who produced all three previous G.I. Joe films, is attached as producer.
The franchise has struggled. The last entry, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, starring Henry Golding, made just $40 million worldwide on an $88 million budget in 2021.
Who Is Max Landis?
Landis is the son of John Landis, the director behind The Blues Brothers and Animal House.
His script for Chronicle in 2012, a found footage superhero film directed by Josh Trank, launched the careers of Michael B. Jordan and Dane DeHaan and announced him as one of the most exciting writers in Hollywood.
He sold spec scripts for millions. He wrote Bright, a big-budget Will Smith fantasy for Netflix in 2017 that became one of the platform’s biggest early hits.
He wrote a Superman analysis video that went viral on YouTube. He wrote a DC Comics mini-series. Then the Daily Beast article published and all of it stopped.
Landis Hire Part Of The Bigger Picture
This is not the first controversial rehire under David Ellison’s leadership at Paramount.
The Hollywood Reporter noted that the Landis hiring fits a documented pattern at the Skydance-run studio, which has also brought back Brett Ratner, Johnny Depp, and John Lasseter, each of whom faced their own period of industry exile.
The studio appears to be operating on the principle that talent outweighs reputational risk when the prize is a multi-billion-dollar franchise.
Whether that calculation is correct will depend partly on how the treatments turn out and partly on how much the public cares by the time a film actually reaches theaters.
Development hell is real. A G.I. Joe treatment becoming an actual movie is far from guaranteed.
For now, Max Landis has a Paramount assignment, a G.I. Joe franchise, and an Instagram post that says “Somehow.”
