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By Joshua Tyler
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In the long, storytelling history of Disney, the company has had huge successes, including the Marvel cinematic universe that creates history and their entire animated output in the ’90s. More recently, they have suffered through a series of failures, ruined by critics and ignored by filmmakers. Yet Disney has not made the failure of the 2012 box office yet when the studio released the big budget Sci-Fi adventure film John Carter.
At the time of release, John Carter Hold the suspicious difference of being the least profitable Disney movie ever made. While recent movies are like Snow white He may soon challenge that record, John Carter was a drailblazer in epic failure.
Roll sci-fi Adventure based on Edgar Burroughs’ classic novels, John Carter It should have been a huge success, but it never had a chance. This is why John Carter failed.
Barsoom world
John Carter relates to a former disillusioned civil war -fan -carriedman for Mars. Or as the planet’s inhabitants call it, Barsoom.
On Barsoom, Carter discovers that thanks to the smaller seriousness and the thinner atmosphere of the planet, he has supernatural agility and strength. Soon he is embroidered in the conflict among the various Martian races, including the Humanoid Red Martians, the Barbarian Green Martians, and the terns like God.
Along the way, Carter encounters and falls for Dejah Thoris, the princess of Helium City-State. She joins her to help save her people from their competitors. It’s a simple, old-fashioned hero. Overall, the movie pulls it off.
John Carter should have been Princess of Mars
It didn’t matter whether John Carter’s movie pulled it away because no one bought a ticket to see it. John Carter is devastated to a failure from the moment the words “John Carter” were added to the film’s posters.
Originally, Disney is going to go with the much higher and more descriptive title John Carter from MarsBut they dropped “from Mars” early in the production process and went with only the very generic name of the film’s main character.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels on which the film is based more than 100 by the time John Carter was released.
Disney almost did not talk about the origin of the story and did not really play up the fact that he was based on a classic at all.
So, no one knew who or what John Carter was, when Disney began to promote their big budget barrier. And, as a film title it is hard to imagine something more boring and unwise than “John Carter”.
And it’s not as if other titles were not available.
The first book is called the Burroughs series Princess MarsAnd that’s the kind of exciting and interesting title that would have sold some tickets. Especially given the potential Disney Princess connection.
Instead, they went with the most generic and common name that can be imagined and expected that to draw people’s interest.
Dropping all the possible contacts with the books may have been deliberately.
For their film John Carter, Disney tinted the contents of the right grade of the books, in a clear effort to make them as family friendly as possible. They probably didn’t want the original for parents and thought their film version may not be intended for children.
If you read the books Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about John Carter back in 1912, what you find is very different from the Disney movie made out of it.
Burroughs books are violent and kind of sexual.
They are more like a sci-fi version of Conan the Barbarian than something you would expect from the best director Pixar.
All you really need to know is that everyone, most of the time in the books, is completely naked.
There is a reason for it, and it’s a real central plot point, so very few are covered.
Avatar is pg-13 John Carter
Avatarwho “borrowed” much of his conspiracy from John Carter Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books, has solved some of this matter of nudity by making his rare warrior characters of clothes in CGI blue aliens. Somehow, that’s more culturally acceptable, nevertheless, from my viewing space, it’s not quite clear why.
But Disney doesn’t make those kinds of movies, so instead of going for the hard PG-13 middle ground found, they tried to squeeze into a family-friendly PG-13 soft format.
And he did not work. No one took their children to see him. Sales data revealed ticketing after the fact that most of those who bought a ticket was over 25.
Perhaps they should have told people that John Carter was the first ever-acting film by Andrew Stanton, whose two previous films, Wal-e. and Find Nemoare immediate Oscar winners and classics.
And yet Disney made very few of those achievements.
As Disney was not going to make the fine, graduated film-perhaps the author of the books might want them to be, and they were not going to promote Andrew Stanton, they could have played other strengths of the script they had in advertising. They didn’t do it either.
In the books and the film, John Carter In the story of an adventure, yes, but one built around a romance between a princess and a common. And yet, Disney never bothered to tell her prospective audience that there could be a kiss.
More reasons to blame avatar
Avatar very popular at about the same time, and part of the reason Avatar Which was such a success is that it appealed to women so much or more than it appealed to men. And yet avatar stole a lot of John CarterPlot and many of the same beats are there.
AvatarTrailers were not shy about playing up the romance angle, craving Cameron’s film as a story of forbidden love.
John CarterTrailers acted as if the film was built primarily to create pictures that could look good on a little boy’s lunchbox.
They have very little romance and worse, very little of the strong lead female character of the Dejah Thoris film.
Dejah Thoris is a warlike scientist and is arguably the film’s most important character.
Young women would do well to look up to a character like Dejah Thoris, but because of the marketing of the film, those women probably didn’t realize that she was an important part of the story.
Martian’s mess
John Carter Opens with a refinished version of the Disney Logo, bathed in red to honor the film’s Martian location.
That logo is the latter even a remote alien you will see in the film, because it is mostly placed in a fruitless desert that might have been just as easily in Utah … and because that’s where they shot it, it was actually.
That’s a problem because when you look after the film’s vehicles and indeed to some extent as you watch the film, it’s hard to feel the sense of wonder the film is trying to convey.
That problem carries over to the alien John Carter’s species also encountered.
The Tharks look completely alien and as a result, they are undoubtedly the best part of the film.
But Dejah Thoris and her people, which Edgar Rice Burroughs describe as “red” people in Mars, looks primarily as human beings who wore a spray tanning bunch and then all went out for bad tattoos.
No matter how Disney might have been marketed, seen in small snippets, this all looks far too familiar.
Perhaps this is why the Disney marketing team deviated from the leading and center of Dejah Thoris, who looked human, and instead insist on wasting almost all their marketing on showing a small battle between John Carter and Giant, Gwyn Barsoomian apaod.
But a film set on an alien planet should look and feel different. It should feel excited, as something new you have to go to. Like somewhere you want to be and explore. World John CarterFor all his charm, never feel excited and new.
It may be possible to tell this story in a way that will actually get people to see, but the Disney team never found it.
John Carter is accidents
John Carter A huge investment from Disney, costing over $ 260 million in production costs back in 2012.
More than $ 100 million was spent on the horrific marketing campaign of the film.
John Carter Opened in number two, behind that successful animated movie all in fact The loraxin his second week of release.
It only got worse from there.
Analysts estimate that Disney lost as much as $ 250 million on the film.
And was not very popular with critics.
The reviews tied up, and while Roger Ebert, the world’s largest Silver Fan, having tried to find the positive things in him, he, like most critics, gave him an ordinary middle -level star score.
In the process of floping, John Carter Tanked the career of actor Taylor Kitsch, who at the time was considered hot and coming.
John Carter It was not the only sci-fi tragedy, just the most.
It was preceded a year earlier by the box office disaster of Cowboys and Alien.
But it was John CarterA historical fall that changed the sci-fi film trail in Hollywood.
In the years that followed, we started getting darker, more polished sci-fi, as again, studios became more risky and returned to the well.
The era of throwing huge budgets for experimental adventure scripts, beat is over and shows no sign of coming back.
It does not mean, however, that John Carter is not worth your time. For all its flaws, Andrew Stanton’s film is a lot of fun and Willem Dafoe’s work as Tars Tarkas is worth the cost of receiving only.
And Burroughs books are still innovative and great. They’re part Conan the barbarian and part Missing in space. Somehow a better company will find a way to do justice to them.
