Rise of the Beasts closed on a G.I. Joe agent offering Noah Diaz a job, and since 2023 the open question about that scene has been who else would take one. Deadline’s October 1 report that Bradley Cooper will play Duke in the G.I. Joe picture Danny McBride is directing for Paramount answers it in passing. The paragraph setting that film up says the Joe film “will be uncoupled from a previous crossover film with Transformers that is no longer in development,” and that is the first mention of the crossover’s status in any of the reporting on the Joe film.

The clause is doing less than the headlines built on top of it. “No longer in development” is a line about who is being paid to work on something, and studios use it for scripts that get revived later as well as for scripts that do not. But no statement from Paramount or from Hasbro Entertainment appears anywhere in the coverage, so one subordinate clause inside somebody else’s casting exclusive is all there is to go on. [1]

What is moving is a Joe film, and nothing said about it so far needs an Autobot in it. Cooper takes the Duke role Channing Tatum played, with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Mark Vahradian and Zev Foreman producing for Hasbro Entertainment. McBride has said where it is set, on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast in July and quoted this week by Empire: “there’s a town called Springfield that is secretly all Cobra […] which is where our film takes place.” Springfield is the town Cobra owns outright in the Marvel comic, so the villain is already on the board.

The crossover has never happened on film. In print and on the shelf we get it constantly, and both are shipping right now: Transformers #35 put Wheeljack in his lab while the rest of the Autobots held off a Decepticon assault, December’s Energon Universe issues are getting black and white manga incentive covers from Satoshi Shiki and Manabu Yashiro, and Hasbro’s Transformers Collaborative keeps building the team-ups in plastic. The Autobot Kup Triple “T” set, which ships with Sgt. Slaughter and Leatherneck, is in stock at BigBadToyStore at $67.49 against an $89.99 list.

So the stinger is still unanswered on screen, and the only line anyone has about it sits inside a casting story for a different picture.

[1] Knight Edge Media ran the story under a headline using the word Kills while its own body copy said paused. HissTank went with Cancelled this morning and then quoted the same clause underneath it. Empire called the crossover “officially no-longer-happening”. All three cite Deadline, and Deadline wrote “no longer in development”.

Sources

  • Deadline, October 1, 2026, Bradley Cooper cast as Duke in Danny McBride’s G.I. Joe film, reported via HissTank and Empire.
  • Danny McBride on Springfield: Happy Sad Confused, July 2026, as quoted by Empire.
  • Price and stock state read off the BigBadToyStore listing on October 2, 2026.
  • Key art: BigBadToyStore product photography.