Last week, Disney’s John Carter was looking to be a surefire bomb. Today it’s something different, but sadly not by much. Early tracking seems to be confirming a growing suspicion that the film won’t be able to recoup much of its monumental budget back. According to LA Times, opening weekend gross estimates have been revised from $30 million to an even more troubling $25 million. Ouch.
What makes John Carter‘s peril all the more disconcerting is the fact that Josh and I, along with a lot of critics, think the film’s actually pretty good. The John Carter brand, though of a different time, is not without its fans. Disney wouldn’t have fronted a quarter of a billion dollars for this film if they didn’t have designs on a franchise at some point in time. But the closer we get to release, the louder the thud of apathy becomes. Here’s what’s playing against the first event film of 2012, and unfortunately it has nothing to do with quality:
The Dick Cook Regime No Longer Runs the Mouse House – Indeed, the former Walt Disney Pictures Chairman that greenlit John Carter is no longer with the company – having stepped down in 2009. So while new chairman Rich Ross and co. probably aren’t actively rooting for the film’s tanking, they can stand to take a loss and come out relatively unscathed. If tracking is wrong and the movie hits, great. But if it doesn’t, it’s just as easy to chalk it up as another failed picture from the regime that also gave us Prince of Persia.
If might also help to explain the following…
Disney’s Promotional Arm is Taking a Hard Sell and Making it Harder – Based on a series of early 20th century Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan) novels, the Barsoom series is widely regarded as a cornerstone of sci-fi storytelling. This could have gone a long way in ingratiating the film with audiences, but Disney never pushed it. Instead, the trailers have pushed the film as a dry, sci-fi actioner – one that looks suspiciously like a feature adaptation of the arena scene in Attack of the Clones. And the fact that the film takes place on Mars has almost been completely hidden from mainstream audiences.
It's hard not to look at this and think of clones attacking.
So much of it has to do with that atrocious title. Carter pulls mostly from Burrough’s “A Princess of Mars.” And while John Carter is absolutely the star of that and the driving force of the Barsoom series, his name alone tells you less than Jack or Shit about the film. And it’s not as if “John Carter” is a household name. Instead, Disney probably saw the tepid response to Mars Needs Moms and got the wrong idea: that it wasn’t the substandard quality of the picture, but the film’s location that tanked it. So Mars was removed from much of Disney’s sell, and so too was any hope of conveying this film to mainstream audiences in logical fashion.
So it would seem that Disney decided to back slowly out of the John Carter brand when they actually had the opportunity to create a greater sense of mystique around both the character and his world. For the uninitiated, it’s hard to invest in a character if you don’t have a general idea of what he’s fighting for or, especially, where in the hell he’s fighting. The Little Mermaid takes place under the sea – that’s a title doing its job. John Carter is a dude, not a great title.
No One Cares About Taylor Kitsch… Yet – Relax, Friday Night Lights fans. It might not always be this way. But right now most people have very little idea who the face on the poster is. If anything, John Carter serves to benefit another big budget film: that being Peter Berg’s Battleship. At least audiences will be familiar with Kitsch by the time Battleship comes out. It’s been a few days since X-Men Origins: Wolverine came out and while Kitsch’s Gambit was inoffensive, he didn’t exactly set the world on fire.
Films like Prince of Persia have gone a long way in proving that there’s no such thing as a bankable movie star anymore (MIB3 may still be another example). But John Carter isn’t Harry Potter or even Sherlock Holmes, a familiar face might’ve assuaged Disney’s soft sell to audiences.
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It’s shitty that these factors have nothing to do with whether or not director Andrew Stanton’s film is actually any good. It is. But this seems to be a case of Disney never realizing what they had with John Carter. The film will find its audience eventually, it’s good enough to be appreciated over time. But the unfortunate truth is that a sequel feels like a longshot at this point. That’s an odd statement for a film that doesn’t come out for a few more days, but what I most took away from John Carter was how close the creative forces came to nailing it. Close enough to be worthy of a second go.
Don’t be surprised if Disney, when John Carter wins the weekend, announces a sequel right away. But they also announced a sequel to Tron: Legacy. Sometimes it’s easier to save face and hope we all forget. Maybe John Carter can be different.
17 comments
I would love to see this take off and become a massive word-of-mouth hit, I really would.
The weirdest thing to me has been the amount of internet “movie fans” who have been actively rooting for this thing to tank. I’m not saying it’s necessarily been on CHUD, I don’t even post on the forums, but I have seen it at a lot of sites. There has been no excitement for the possibility of a good film, it’s been all snark and cynicism and predictions of just HOW massively it will fail. I mean…..yea. I know, it’s the internet. Cynicism rules the roost. But for a legendary sci-fi story…..that was the template for Star Wars and Avatar and many other classic sci-fi films…..that’s been attempted many times over the last couple of decades without successs….helmed by a director who knows story and emotion………..I just don’t get why the NERDS haven’t been excited. The general movie-going public, sure, I can see why it’s been a hard sell (see: all that stuff that was mentioned in the article) but for us nerds, we should ALL be excited. And from what I’ve been noticing, that just hasn’t been the case. And that bums me out.
I haven’t seen the film yet, so I can’t really comment on the films quality, but it’s sad seeing a movie get shot down like this before really getting out of the gate. At least the critics are being fair to it.
I’ll admit that the marketing is just pure garbage. No one wants to blindly see the film after watching one of the dozen generic trailers.
The commercials just haven’t looked good. I really want to see this movie, but the commercials are trying to convince me not to. This “Disney botched the marketing” angle will go down in history, I believe. I’m almost afraid to like it now. I loved Speed Racer, but it tanked badly. It has found its audience, but a sequel will never ever happen.
I think it’s more the “inside baseball” aspect of fandom working against this than a general dislike. Every douchenerd wants to be first to call a win or lose on a big franchise picture.
But marketing wise there hasn’t even been really obvious approaches like “Before Star Wars, Before Avatar, there was…”. And on the naming front “A Princess of Mars” + Kitch in fetish straps could have too much of a Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras vibe for the average movie-goer, so I get why that wasn’t a strong direction to go in. So maybe something like an “Indiana Jones and the…” sort of title – “Tribes of Mars”? “Warriors of Mars”? “Planet of War”? Or go totally shameless and call it “Mars Wars: A New Hope”, LOL.
“John Carter and the Princess of Mars” does absolutely everything a title should do. It’s a pulpy old-fashioned adventure/sci-fi/love story and, yes, we’ll say it came first. Fans have already done better marketing than Disney.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that as well, and it’s really disheartening. (The AICN talkbacks seem to be the place where the most vitriolic comments are concentrated. I guess that’s not much of a surprise.) I actually got to see the movie last night at a preview screening put together by Badass Digest, Collider and Slashfilm, and I rather enjoyed it. It’s not perfect, but it is a lot of fun. (The audience mostly seemed to like it, too.) I’m sure a lot of hardcore John Carter fans will be disappointed with the major deviations from the original story,–I even had to tell myself to let it go and just enjoy it for what it is–but it’s definitely the type of movie that can connect with mainstream audiences. Unfortunately, thanks to Disney’s weak marketing, I don’t think it will have that chance.
Thinking back to the early comments made on this particular site, it seems to me that Renn was one of the people who was actively showing his disdain for this film, and looking to trash it so, what does that tell you.
I hate to say it, but John Carter may have outdated itself. I hang with a supremely geeky group of friends, children of the 80’s all, and of that entire group, only three of us (myself included) have any idea who John Carter is or the story’s significance to the sci-fi and particularly space opera genres. John Carter just simply hasn’t been on the pop-culture radar for SO LONG that many people don’t even realize it’s based on some classic books.
Heck, one of my friends was able to connect to the story through an old Marvel Comics Star Wars story arc that was a multi-issue homage to John Carter, but had no idea about John Carter himself. On the plus side, they’re all interested in seeing it after it was explained to them, but prior to that John Carter was just earning shrugs and blank stares, and this is even among “geeky” folks…I can’t even imagine how ignorant most of the general moviegoing audience is as to the origins of the story, much less the teenage portion of that audience that probably barely even knows who Tarzan is, much less John Carter.
I don’t know about that. I think we’ve all had reservations and expressed them. But I haven’t seen Renn spouting off blind hatred towards the film. Disagree.
Maybe he was a little dismissive, but so was everyone else based on the initial images and marketing. I have all the John Carter books in hardcover with the (mostly) Frazzetta covers, and even I wasn’t going to see this movie originally. Word of mouth is selling me.
The marketing has been a clusterfuck. The film comes across as a poor man’s Avatar. And given how quite a few movie goers were underwhelmed by Avatar, who the heck wants to see an Avatar rip-off?! (the irony of course being Avatar drunk deep from the well of the John Carter novels). Plus, it really does seem to be solid but bland. Nothing in the trailers/clips have grabbed me by the balls. Lastly…this is no longer the 80’s. Pulp adventure movies that require the audience to suspend disbelief for two hours don’t carry much weight in these cynical times.
It’s a failure exactly because it cost over a quarter of a billion to make and probably half that again on marketing. The more money you throw at something doesn’t necessarily make it better. Pricing themselves out of the market is a shite business model.
JazzyJustin: The problem that I’m seeing isn’t necessarily that people are talking bad about it, but that people aren’t talking about it AT ALL. Whenever the trailer’s aired (with what I thought was a very impressive use of Peter Gabriel’s cover) the response afterward is eerily quiet, as if people don’t quite know what to make of it.
I think the reason The Nerds haven’t latched onto it, though, is fairly simple: Nerds tend to pride themselves on being know-it-alls who were fans of something before the general populace caught wind of it; hipsterish, if you will. This isn’t something that is a few decades old, but something that’s MUCH older. There’s no initial base to rally around the cause because its age seemed to have aided in its fading out of the public eye.
Yeah, that has a “Harry Potter and the…” vibe to it. John Carter = Harry Potter in terms of non-descript hero names.
So again – Marketing Fail. What the fuck do they do in those meetings? Play hackey-sack?
I’ve been telling everyone I know that I’ve read numerous reports that the movie is good. Hopefully the first weekend word of mouth will help out. It worked for Horrible Bosses (among others).
I saw John Carter last night and really liked it. I’d suggest 2D if available, as the 3D didn’t add anything.
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