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The rumors are true. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra won’t be screened for the press sans a few select online journos and gossipers from the top of the heap. To all the dolts that screamed to critics that they didn’t matter after the release of Transformers 2, guess what? It looks like you’re wrong…and right.

I know many of you are probably thinking “Hey <expletive>, am I supposed to feel sorry for you for having to wait until opening day to see the movie like the rest of us?” No, that’s not it (well, maybe a little). It’s the mentality that Paramount is possibly scared of putting out a bad movie that make millions upon millions while facing the specter of bad press. As if that’s a problem.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is easily the biggest movie of 2009. By the time the film leaves the top ten, packs its print and releases an Ultimate Edition on DVD andBlu-ray, it will have amassed over $400 million domestically. That’s a ton of duckets. It’s also one of the worst movies of the year, if not the worst movie ever to have amassed such an ungodly sum of money.

It’s nothing new. Summer blockbusters range from <fart sound> to <orgasm sound> but usually rake in trucks full of the green stuff if it manages to stir the interest of the general public. With Transformers 2, the lines were drawn between critics and audiences with a big fat magic marker. Critics hated it with the kind of vigor usually reserved for local politicians and pedophiles. Fans were ecstatic to point out that it didn’t matter what critics said and that the movie was going to be successful no matter what. They were right if your definition of success was purely box office revenue. It was a massive unadulterated success and the press didn’t matter one bit.

It was critic-proof. So what’s the difference here? “The impression given to viewers is that G.I. Joe sucks, so the studio is doing everything possible to keep the press at bay. It sucks like Jenna Jameson and Paramount appears to feel that its only direction is to hide the movie from “elitist critics” and screen the film at military bases or areas with a high concentration of military families. Pay no mind to the stripping of “Real American Hero” from the film to make it more appealing overseas. I’m sure they won’t notice.

Now we’re on the horizon of one of the summer’s most anticipated action films: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. The Joes have a lot in common with their robot brothers and sisters. They’re both toy lines, they both hold a place inside the hearts of ’80s kids everywhere, and, hell, they were even in the same comic books together. The difference? G.I. Joe looks terrible. Remember when the teasers for Transformers 2 first arrived? Everybody, and I mean everybody, was excited. It was an event and the movie, at the very least, was expected to be entertaining. It wasn’t. Instead, it was a sexy mind-numbing mess. With G.I. Joe, it’s actually the opposite. From the silly “Halo” suits to the omnipresent feeling that the the film just FEELS ridiculous, G.I. Joe, perhaps, could be heading the way of their giant robot pals: panned.

Or maybe not. So far the sparse reviews that are on Rotten Tomatoes look fairly positive. Time will tell what the meter will look like come Monday but one thing is for sure: G.I. Joe isn’t Transformers. Thank you, Jesus.

Tune in this weekend to see were the chips fall.