In April of 2016 news broke that Hasbro was going to make an effort to leverage several properties into a shared cinematic universe. The properties included G.I. Joe, Visionaries, M.A.S.K., Micronauts, and ROM.
Art from IDW’s Hasbro Shared Universe which features Transformers, G.I. Joe, M.A.S.K., Rom, and others
The toy company brought together a who’s who of storytellers to form a writers room and start figuring out how all of the pieces could interlock. From Variety:
The writers assigned to the room are Lindsey Beer (“Wizard of Oz”), Michael Chabon(“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”), Cheo Coker (“Ray Donovan”), Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley (“Spider-Man: Homecoming”), Joe Robert Cole (“Black Panther”), Nicole Perlman (“Guardians of the Galaxy”), Jeff Pinkner (“The Dark Tower”), Nicole Riegel (“Soldier Girls”), Geneva Robertson (“Tomb Raider”) and Brian K Vaughan (“Lost”).
After that initial announcement, there wasn’t much follow-up on the status of any sort of shared universe.
We do know Akiva Goldsman, who oversaw the writers room as well as the last three Transformers films, has left Hasbro to work with Paramount.
Curious about whether or not we’ll ever see this universe I started to do some digging. The best (and limited) information I could find was in a Hollywood Reporter profile of Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner. Buried at the very end of the June 2017 interview Goldner says:
There are vault brands like Micronauts, MASK, ROM and Visionaries. We had a writers room last summer to develop a suite of stories. My expectation is that by 2020, we should see some major entertainment coming from the development that we’ve undertaken.
That’s it. No follow-up for further explanation. Whether or not Hasbro still plans to combine that suite of stories into a shared universe is still a big question mark. The concept has worked well for IDW who holds the comic licenses for all of those toy brands.
The 10-year-old in me would simply be happy with a G.I. Jor reboot that mirrors the original Marvel comic book series.
