Scott Mendelson follows the entertainment industry at Forbes and has been one of the better observers of the John Carter saga from the beginning. Looking at it strictly from a business perspective, he re-examines the train wreck of the John Carter release three years later with an eye toward extracting whatever larger meaning there is to be extracted from what happened. This is highly recommended reading for anyone following the John Carter story.
His first point is to look at how nasty the pre-release buzz was, and why:
The pre-release buzz was sour almost from the get-go, specifically after word got out that Disney’s John Carter Of Mars was going to cost $250 million. Said data point was ironically hidden in reporting discussing cost overruns on The Lone Ranger, which on its surface seemed like a more explicitly commercial venture. Journalists and pundits such as myself were aghast. How was this live-action fantasy film, which starred no one of note and was based on a novel that few beyond the hardcore geeks had heard of, going to possibly recoup a $250m production cost, especially during an early March release date? Surely this was a prime example of studio hubris? Surely there was no way this was going to work out unless John Carter really was the next Avatar?
He’s right about where the buzz went sour …. it was in August 2011, 8 months before the release, that Disney inadvertently let slip that the budget for John Carter was a whopping $250m when a studio exec quoted that figure in the context of discussing why Disney had just pulled the plug on The Lone Ranger for having too high a budget. It is an absolute certainty that it was an unauthorized disclosure and it had a devastating impact simply because most industry writers, like Mendelson, heard that and thought — WTF? What can they be thinking?
The tragedy is that Disney had a ready answer if they had just elected to use it — and Mendelson gets to that later on. It was that they had given full creative freedom to one of the studio’s most respected superstars, Andrew Stanton, who had grossed over $1B with Finding Nemo and was en route to a $600m with Wall-E. This was at a time when the average Pixar movie was costing $180m; thus positioning the film as the first live action Pixar movie (even if it wasn’t going to officially wear the Pixar brand) and identifying it with Andrew Stanton would have gone a long way toward quelling the outrage. Would it have been enough to cause the knives to go back in their sheaths? Probably not. But as it was, Disney did nothing.
In fact, JC had two possible marketing hooks — Stanton/Pixar doing live action, and John Carter of Mars as the original source inspiration for Star Wars, Avatar, etc. In other words, use the Pixar/Stanton angle to create curiousity and intrigue around the notion that these guys don’t screw up; if they’re involved, it must be something special. And make sure audiences know that this is not derivative — everything ELSE is derivative.
Mendelson writes:
Yes, Princess of Mars was among the first modern fantasy adventure stories. Yes, every fantastical adventure to explode into theaters over the last several decades, from Star Wars to Avatar, from Planet of the Apes to Army of Darkness, owes something to the groundbreaking fantasy fiction on which John Carter was based. But that’s not common knowledge and the film’s marketing gave you little idea of the film’s historical pedigree. For reasons that I dare not speculate upon, the marketing for John Carter was painfully generic and outright bland, with one uninspiring trailer after another. We saw a straight-faced bare-chested white male hero played by a relative unknown, a desert landscape, various alien creatures, and a damsel-in-distress to be rescued and romanced. To audiences that had perhaps grown up on the various would-be rip-offs of this specific source material, they had little reason to think they were seeing anything other than Generic Blockbuster: The Movie.
This is so true, and was so obvious at the time. Not only was it obvious simply on a visceral level when you looke at the materials Disney was putting out – it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention and doing the kind of social media tracking that studios are supposed to do. John Carter trailers and TV spots were generating almost zero buzz….and what the experts cause “positive/negative ratio” of social media commentary was disastrously bad.
One of the great mysteries that I tried to unravel in John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood was … why did Disney let this happen? Why was there no course correction? Mendelson doesn’t go into that, and it’s a complicated situation indeed that has to do with personalities and studio politics that were unique to Disney.
It was the most expensive non-sequel ever made with almost no insurance towards actually recouping said budget. It was not a well-known property, not a sequel, had no stars, had a generally unknown filmmaker with no live-action film making experience, plus an unsafe release date which limited the chances of strong legs. There was little plausible reason that Disney (or anyone else) should have expected the film to be the kind of hit it needed to be.
Then:
I have long argued that Disney expected the media to arbitrarily anoint John Carter as ‘the next cool thing’ and then expected audiences to flock like lemmings to a (from a marketing perspective) terrible-looking movie that they had no reason to expect they would enjoy. The film was not based on a known entity, had no stars, had a generic title, and looked like a Mad Libs variation on the fantasy action film template. It cost so much money that it absolutely had to be the next big thing just to break even. It wasn’t really new. It lacked new sights, iconic characters, moments of visual wonderment, classic action beats, and even a hint of political/social relevance. Without all of the other ingredients, and with a lackluster marketing campaign to boot, the film was doomed as soon as the budget climbed over $125 million.
Now, I know that some of us here will argue with the “lacked new sights, iconic characters, moments of visual wonderment, classic action beats,” part … but folks, he’s not wrong. “It wasn’t really new,” is a sad fact because, as others have noted, Burroughs was “strip-mined” by Lucas and Cameron long before John Carter hit the screens. Which is precisely why the marketing should have hit on the “Heritage” theme and played that for all it was worth, because without doing that — it was doomed to appear derivative even when it wasn’t. Such a simple, obvious concept, but it eluded Disney.
Arrrggghhhhh!
Anyway, enough of this. It is frustrating to contemplate it all again.
What does it mean for the future of John Carter on screen?
Well, what’s different now is that John Carter did come out, and although it indeed became an “iconic flop” at the time …. over time it has been somewhat rehabilitated, at least to the point that an enterprising producer who offers it at the right price point ($150m in today’s budget dollars) and with all the benefit of hindsight that the Disney debacle has produced — such a producer would have at least a fighting chance of getting some traction, particularly if he brought in some major foreign partners (China and Russia especially) to share the financial risk. It would still be a heavy lift, but not an impossible one, for the right producer with the right combination of studio relations; talent relations; and overall vision. I’m not sure who that producer might be. I had been hoping that Jerry Weintraub might, if his upcoming Tarzan is successful, be the one, but sadly he’s gone. Harry Knowles is still out there and in love with the material but he’s not ‘inside Hollywood’ and could be part of such an equation, but not the main part. There’s gotta be somebody good out there who would rise to the challenge, as Dejah put it: “Will you fight for Barsoom?” Just don’t know who it might be.
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Grrrrr…. might as well plug JCGOH after this one, given the subject matter. This book continues to chug along mercilessly on Amazon, by the way ….eBook still selling 5-10 copies a day, two years later, which is a remarkable testament to the fact that the film keeps grabbing new fans who discover the books and who wonder what went wrong and why there’s not sequel…..
