Did Battleship Sink G.I. Joe?

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Not everyone liked Battleship as much as we did. The $209-million epic did only $25.3 million at the box office on opening weekend, just a few hundred thousand more than low-budget powerhouse Act of Valor. That crash-and-burn disaster might have given game-maker Hasbro and Paramount Pictures cold feet about this summer's release of G.I. Joe: Retaliation.

The studio announced yesterday that they've canceled (sorry, delayed) the movie's June 29th release so they can go back add convert the film to 3D. The new opening date for the action picture is March 29, 2013.

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A lot of Hollywood folks were surprised that Hasbro wanted to make a sequel to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra because that one didn't really make money, certainly not on the Transformers level they were looking for. When the movie started production last year, the studio trumpeted the fact that they were making the new one for less money even though they'd added Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Bruce Willis to the cast. A lower budget and bigger stars would equal more money.

One of the ways that they saved cash was a decision to shoot in regular old 2D and director Jon M. Chu even did interviews where he talked about how excited he was to work in the old school format instead of the 3D he'd used for his most successful films (Step Up 3D and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never). Battleship was also famously shot in 2D and we can now see how that worked out, so it's not hard to draw some conclusions about why Hasbro got cold feet.

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