>>995588
If they can't make it work as a kid's franchise any more I wish they would just make Joe stuff aimed at adults. Along the lines of Resolute and the comics. Ultimately it is a military-based franchise, which no one wants to market to kids in this day and age where guns and military are considered controversial. The old cartoon had lasers instead of guns and robots getting shot instead of soldiers, but we all knew that it just did that because it had to. Some sci-fi stuff is okay, but it should be grounded and somewhat plausible. Like in Resolute they had weather control but they tied it into HAARP which is real.
The costumes and personalities of the characters are larger than life enough. Just stick closely to that and play it as straight as you can given the subject matter. In the first GI Joe movie they tried to make it into a sci-fi superhero thing with the accelerator suits. That sort of thing will never work because ultimately military is embedded in the DNA of the franchise for better or worse. They also tried to do a Star Wars thing where all the characters were related and it didn't work. They went too far with the sci-fi with nanomachines, etc., and pretended that sort of technology was only five years away. They didn't want Cobra Commander to wear the hood since they thought it looked like al-Qaeda or the Klan. He's supposed to be a bad guy!