11 Aug – The last big picture of the summer "G.I. Joe" took almost US$ 100 mil in worldwide box office collections for the weekend just gone (August 6-9) and topped the charts in Malaysia and Singapore. Despite its chart-topping prowess, the movie is generally rubbished by critics, who weren't privy to any press preview in the U.S. as the studio had characteristically refused to hold one. This marketing move is commonly known to be popularly used on titles that are not critic-friendly, for fear of bad word-of-mouth travelling fast. Box Office Mojo reported: "While riding on the 1980s toy-cartoon-comic brand name and attempting to cash in on some of the disaster thriller appeal of 'Transformers' with the destruction of the Eiffel Tower, the marketing for 'G.I. Joe' mostly resembled 'XXX' and other movies with its clearly computer-generated action set-pieces, such as the brand's most popular character, Snake Eyes, leaping over cars a la Spider-Man. Much of the focus was on 'The Rise of Cobra' (on the movie poster, the bad guys are featured at the top, while the Joes are relegated below the credits), which was a bit cockeyed considering that G.I. Joe itself had yet to be established as a movie franchise. That lack of central heroic characters for audiences to get behind may have limited the appeal."