If you were looking forward to the return of G.I. Joe on the big screen this summer, it looks like you’re going to have to wait a little while longer.

Paramount have decided that instead of opening next month in the US on 29th June (it was to be 3rd August here in the UK), they’re going to push the project back until 29th March, 2013 in order to add in the third dimension in the hopes of getting a bigger foreign box office take, Deadline have just announced.

Jon M. Chu has directed the film, from a script co-written by Zombieland scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and their involvement alone penning the project is enough to make me want to see it.

Chu’s work in the past on dance films (Step Up 3D, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never) looks to have come in very handy, given that directing highly-choreographed dance scenes and action scenes wouldn’t be as far removed from each other as you might at first think.

All that we’ve seen so far definitely suggests that the film would lend itself very well to a 3D conversion, so it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that the studio would want to release it in 3D, the only surprise is how late the decision’s been made in the game.

Deadline’s Nikki Finke quotes,

“We’re going to do a conscientious 3D job because we’ve seen how it can better box office internationally,” one of the studio execs just told me. “Jim Cameron did all of Titanic‘s 3D in post – and look how well that movie turned out.”

And Finke adds,

“3D is huge internationally, with Russia and China building new 3D theaters by the week… Of course, Paramount had to talk its partners on GI Joe 2 into the extra nine months of carrying costs – MGM/Spyglass which has 25%, and David Ellison’s Skydance which has another 25%.”

The reasons for doing it are certainly understandable, and hopefully it will pay off nicely in the long-run. With a $125m. budget, you’d imagine the studio and its partners will want to do all they can to ensure they make good on their investment.

Perhaps the main issue now will be re-marketing the film – given that we’ve seen plenty of awesome things already, it could be a bit difficult to do the same again in six months’ time ahead of its March release, without giving more away yet not just repeating what we’ve already seen.

Nonetheless, the cast is pretty excellent, with old faces returning from the original and a wealth of fresh energy injected into the mix, with the likes of Channing Tatum, Ray Park, and Lee Byung-hun reprising their roles from the first film, and Dwayne (“The Rock”) Johnson, Adrianne Palicki, Elodie Yung, Ray Stevenson, RZA, D.J. Cotrona, Walton Goggins, Jonathan Pryce, and of course Mr. Bruce Willis himself.

In case you missed it last month, here’s the original UK trailer to give you an idea of how awesome this could look in 3D.

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDLiT3neslE’]