https://www.thewrap.com/john-carter-movie-history-why-it-failed/
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Never believe. Always question. Rebuke belief, a.k.a. bias, a.k.a. groupthink, a.k.a. ideology, the bane of skeptical, logical reason.
I actually quite like this movie unironically. But the marketing campaign was probably the worst I saw for a major studio release with that kind of budget. I mean, "Battleship" came out the same year and it was horrible but you know what you got from the trailers.
shareAgreed. The studio botched its release. I don't think they knew what to do with it.
I researched this quite a bit back shortly after its release and discovered also that it did in fact make pretty good money from ticket sales in theaters, but the production process went massively over budget, so it resulted in a financial flop despite getting a respectable amount of ticket sales. It was reported at the time that Andrew Stanton directed it using the same methodology as his previous Pixar animated movies (most of which I liked), resulting in nearly every scene being reshot, sets being rebuilt from the ground up, etc. meaning the entire movie was built and shot twice, essentially, ballooning the budget to much more than it started at.
I also didn't find that Taylor Kitsch, who I quite liked in Friday Night Lights, had enough personality for the character. He just didn't quite pull it off for me like some other actors could have. My view is that was a secondary factor, but that was my impression.
Despite that, I very much enjoyed it, and loved it in 3D. I'm not even sure I can count how many times I've pulled my 3D Blu-Ray out to rewatch it on my 80" screen (that and Tron: Legacy). For me it invoked that feeling of those Saturday morning serials of yesteryear quite adequately. I didn't mind the changes to the story, pulling elements from later books in the series like the Thern and incorporating them into the origin story. In fact, I liked that they did that, and had no problem with Mars being breathable (possibly terraforming).
I can see, though how this subject didn't have a very wide appeal. People breathing on Mars? They hand-waved it with brief exposition, but old-fashioned subject matter of a man in a loincloth jumping around on Mars probably did hurt the ticket sales a bit. In fact, Mars movies in that era in general just never seemed to do well in theaters, even another movie I quite enjoyed "Mars Needs Moms".
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Never believe. Always question. Rebuke belief, a.k.a. bias, a.k.a. groupthink, a.k.a. ideology, the bane of skeptical, logical reason.
From what I remember, they could have told 3 whole stories with the contents of this movie. It all happened a bit fast. His journey was akin to David Lynch's Dune, where the protagonist fast forwarded through many hours worth of storytelling in minutes, then won.
Which seems so strange when Disney and the other studios are desperate to sequelize and drag stories out.
From the trailer, all I remember was him landing on Mars and the "finding his powers" cliché with John Carter leaping around then taking a hit, which looked like it as an origin story from a superhero movie.
But we'd already seen Iron Man fly out of the Earth's atmosphere, freeze up, then fall back down. Leaping around was low level compared.
In 2012, I was thinking "how cliché", little did I know the superhero genre was gearing up for a big push for the next decade.
Heh. Very true. We had no idea what was about to unfold regarding superhero movies after the first Iron Man. I also enjoyed the first Captain America and then Winter Soldier, but many of the later offerings felt like overly bloated cartoons suffering from CGI that overshadowed story. Incidentally, the original superman comic where he could only "leap over buildings with a single bound" was inspired by John Carter's ability to leap around on Barsoom due to the lower gravity as described in the books.
I agree they could have let the story breath a bit more. I'm not sure that would have helped ticket sales, given the nature of today's superhero-dominated market, so what Stanton did in that regard may or may not have been the right move. The bottom line for its financial failure in my mind, though, is that they just spent way too damn much making it. The same product could have been made for half or less of what was spent, but it wasn't handled very efficiently. And with all the other factors against it (e.g., low-appeal subject content, lackluster lead actor, studio mismarketing, etc.), it didn't really have a chance.
_________________________________________
Never believe. Always question. Rebuke belief, a.k.a. bias, a.k.a. groupthink, a.k.a. ideology, the bane of skeptical, logical reason.