John Carter

[Reel]

the surprise twist is that the movie really was titled "John Carter of Mars" all along! I am actually not kidding about this.

so someone forgot to take out the 'Mars' in the end credits?

[polkablues]

It's actually even more fantastic than that: as the movie ends, it shows a big shot of Mars with the title "JOHN CARTER" plastered in big letters across it.  After like half a second, "OF MARS" fades in (FADES IN!) below it, like Stanton decided to have a little last-second title rebellion against Disney.  I laughed out loud, which I'm sure confused literally everyone else in the theater.

[JG]

Its good, I had way more fun with this than any other film of its kind from recent memory. It has its problems, but give a little bit of yourself to it, and it will be good to you. 

[Reel]

Hey, John Carter lovers. Filmspotting did an interview with Andrew Stanton yesterday. Check it out!

[Sleepless]

It's actually even more fantastic than that: as the movie ends, it shows a big shot of Mars with the title "JOHN CARTER" plastered in big letters across it.  After like half a second, "OF MARS" fades in (FADES IN!) below it, like Stanton decided to have a little last-second title rebellion against Disney.  I laughed out loud, which I'm sure confused literally everyone else in the theater.

Haven't seen it yet, but it could also reiterate the transformation he makes from being regular old John Carter at the start of the movie to John Carter of Mars by the end. It was shitty weather here this weekend, so hopefully this had a better box office weekend than people were predicting.

[polkablues]

I'm pretty sure that was the intention, but with all the pre-release hemming and hawing over the title, it took on a whole different meaning.

And from what I've heard, it had a pretty disastrous weekend for a movie that cost $250 million to make. It's sad, but they did such a shit job marketing the thing that they only have themselves to blame.

[©brad]

Yeah this article sums up the failed marketing campaign which was doomed from the very first trailer. Apparently Stanton is kind of a dick too.

[tpfkabi]

Yeah this article sums up the failed marketing campaign which was doomed from the very first trailer. Apparently Stanton is kind of a dick too.

This was interesting. I have no knowledge of the book. Like the article talked about parts of the book being plundered, when I saw the trailer I was thinking how it seemed to be stealing elements from the movies mentioned

[diggler]

I still like Stanton's trailer better.

[Jeremy Blackman]

Why John Carter flopped: 6 theories

http://feed2.theweek.com/article/index/225458/why-john-carter-flopped-6-theories

The bloated $250 million sci-fi epic tanked at the box office this weekend, grossing a meager $30.6 million and finishing behind The Lorax. What went wrong?

As expected, the ambitious sci-fi "fever dream" John Carter tanked at the box office this weekend, earning just $30.6 million on its estimated $250 million budget and finishing behind the The Lorax (which is in its second week). By comparison, four recent films with similarly out-sized budgets — Spider-Man 3, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Avatar, and the most recent Pirates of the Caribbean sequel — averaged $99 million in their debut weekends. Observers had predicted that John Carter would flop, based on its poor performance in audience tracking studies. But now that the film has fulfilled those low expectations, they're enumerating the reasons. Here, six theories:

1. There was no star power
John Carter is a rarity: A massively-budgeted tent-pole film without a single recognizable name in its cast, says John Young at Entertainment Weekly. Producers cast a completely unproven lead, Friday Night Lights' Taylor Kitsch. And while Avatar starred a similarly untested Sam Worthington, "James Cameron's name is as big as any movie star," and Worthington was joined on screen by known-quantities like Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez. "The most familiar face in John Carter was... Mark Strong?"

2. The marketing was a misfire
The movie is the victim of some "really rotten marketing," says Nikki Finke at Deadline. A series of bland, confusing trailers — "as generic" as the film's title — failed to convey the scope of the Civil War-to-Mars story or build interest around the characters. Though you wouldn't know it from the trailers, the film features a compelling love story, which could have snagged female audiences. Shortening the title from the original John Carter of Mars also turned the film into "a sphinx," says Young. "Who is John Carter? Where is he? Why can he leap great distances?" The marketing answered none of these questions.

3. The young guys didn't show up
John Carter is the kind of effects-heavy, action-adventure sci-fi film that's supposed to appeal to the young male demographic that flocked to Transformers or Clash of the Titans, says Amy Kaufman at the Los Angeles Times. Yet the audience that turned out this weekend was surprisingly older; 59 percent were over age 25. Blame the marketing again, says Finke. The studio mistakenly catered to the fanboys of the source material instead of the general public. See exhibit A, says Young: The Super Bowl commercial that "wrongly assumed audiences were so familiar with the John Carter brand that simply seeing the movie's title would excite them."

4. The reviews didn't sell any tickets
Critics were largely polite to John Carter, says Robert Fure at Film School Rejects. Apart from a few hyperbolic raves and pans, most reviews fell into "it's alright" territory. "Consensus is you'll probably think the movie is okay, but you might want to wait for the DVD" — a death knell for a film that cost $250 million to make.

5. It never overcame the initial negative buzz
The movie was "doomed by its first trailer," says Claude Brodesser-Akner at New York. That first action-less and effects-less trailer in July was so "disastrously impotent [and] muddled" that audiences were simply left thinking, "What was that?" Later attempts to refine the marketing campaign came too late. The film "had become a punch line — to those on whom it managed to register at all." Once the "established simplistic narrative that the film is a big-budget flop started to take hold in the press," says Mark Hughes at Forbes, the negative buzz spread so quickly and so loudly that John Carter never stood a chance.

6. Nobody, it seems, wants to go to Mars
Disney now has three relatively recent films set on Mars that have flopped. See previous box office duds Mission to Mars and Mars Needs Moms. "Avoiding the red planet for the next few decades might be a smart move for the Mouse House," says Gregory Ellwood at HitFix.

[pete]

the Vulture piece seemed like disney's market department aggressively reaching out. I thought the first trailer looked fine, and the film's biggest problem is probably the film itself - it looks like ten movies that have come out in the past year.

[polkablues]

6. Nobody, it seems, wants to go to Mars
Disney now has three relatively recent films set on Mars that have flopped. See previous box office duds Mission to Mars and Mars Needs Moms. "Avoiding the red planet for the next few decades might be a smart move for the Mouse House," says Gregory Ellwood at HitFix.

I have a really bad feeling that this is going to be the only lesson Disney gleans from the experience.

[diggler]

6. Nobody, it seems, wants to go to Mars
Disney now has three relatively recent films set on Mars that have flopped. See previous box office duds Mission to Mars and Mars Needs Moms. "Avoiding the red planet for the next few decades might be a smart move for the Mouse House," says Gregory Ellwood at HitFix.

I have a really bad feeling that this is going to be the only lesson Disney gleans from the experience.

The problem is, they gleaned that lesson before the film was even released.

At least there won't be a backlash.

[MacGuffin]

'John Carter' Will Cost Disney $200 Million in Operating Losses
As a result of the catastrophic performance of the action film on Mars, the studio should lose up to $120 million in the quarter.
Source: THR

John Carter will cause Disney to write down about $200 million, the company said Monday.
During the period ending March 31, Disney's second-fiscal quarter, the studio segment will post a loss of from $80 million-$120 million, the company said.

"In light of the theatrical performance of John Carter ($184 million global box office), we expect the film to generate an operating loss of approximately $200 million during our second fiscal quarter ending March 31," Disney's statement issued Monday said. " As a result, our current expectation is that the Studio segment will have an operating loss of between $80 and $120 million for the second quarter."

[Jeremy Blackman]

I love that Reuters cites Wikipedia 3 times in 4 paragraphs...

Megabomb 'John Carter' may be Hollywood's biggest loser

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/sns-rt-us-johncarter-boxofficebombsbre82j19r-20120320,0,756258.story

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Ultra competitive movie studios rarely want to sit atop this box office list. When the Walt Disney Co said on Monday that it expected its sci-fi movie "John Carter" to lose about $200 million, it very likely shot the intergalactic box office bomb to the top of Hollywood's biggest loser chart.

If so - and box office math is always a little tricky in Tinseltown - the megaflop would achieve iconic status by surpassing the 1995 Geena Davis-Matthew Modine pirate flick "Cutthroat Island" that the Guinness Book of World Records lists as the biggest bomb of all-time. That movie lost $147 million, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which also puts the MGM film at the top of its list.

Infamous misfires like director Ron Howard's "The Alamo," Eddie Murphy's "The Adventures of Pluto Nash", the Matthew McConaughey-Penelope Cruz action film "Sahara" and director Robert Zemeckis' 2011 animated film "Mars Needs Moms" all passed the dubious $140 million loss threshold, according to Wikipedia.

Of course, any movie box office list is subject to serious interpretation. The Wikipedia list, for instance, has converted the film's ticket sales to inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars, but includes only worldwide box office and not DVD or TV sales.