By Joshua Tyler | Published
In the long history of Disney, society has experienced massive successes, notably the Marvel cinematographic universe which made history and all their animated production in the 90s. More recently, they suffered from a series of failures, ridiculed by criticisms and ignored by moviegoers. However, Disney has not yet managed to reach the 2012 box office when the studio released the big budget science fiction adventure film John Carter.
At the time of his release, John Carter held the dubious distinction of being the least profitable Disney film ever made. While recent films like Snow White could soon challenge this record, John Carter was a pioneer in epic failure.
A rolling science fiction adventure based on classic novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter should have been a huge success, but that had never been lucky. This is why John Carter failed.
The world of Barsoom
John Carter speaks of a veteran of the civil war mysteriously disillusioned transported to Mars. Or as residents of the planet call it, Barsoom.
On Barsoom, Carter discovers that thanks the reduced gravity of the planet and the thinner atmosphere, he has a superhuman agility and force. It takes place quickly in the conflicts between the various Martian races, including the Red Martians Humanoids, the Barbarian Green Martians and the therns similar to God.
Along the way, Carter meets and falls in love already Thoris, princess of the city-state of helium. He joins with her to help save his people from their rivals. These are tips from simple and old -fashioned heroes. For the most part, the film withdraws it.
John Carter should have been a princess of March
Whether John Carter’s film has succeeded or not had any importance because no one bought a ticket to see it. John Carter was dedicated to failure almost from the moment when the words “John Carter” were added to the film posters.
Originally, Disney was going to go with the title of far superior and more descriptive John Carter de MarsBut they abandoned “from March” at the start of the production process and did not go with the very generic name of the main character in the film.
The novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs on which the film is based was over 100 years old at the time of the release of John Carter.
Disney has almost made no mention of the origins of the story and has not really played the fact that it is based on a classic.
So nobody knew who John Carter was when Disney began to promote their big budget blockbuster. And, as a film title, it is difficult to imagine something more boring and not a dessix than “John Carter”.
And it is not as if there were no other available titles.
The first book in the Burroughs series is called A princess of MarsAnd this is the kind of exciting and interesting title that would have sold tickets. Especially given the Disney Princess Connection potential.
Instead, they went with the most generic and most common name imaginable and expected people’s interest.
Deleting all possible connections with books may have been intentional.
For their film John Carter, Disney attenuated the highly rated content of books, in a clear effort to make it as family as possible. They probably did not want the parents to be the original and thought that their cinematographic version might not be intended for children.
If you read the books that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote on John Carter in 1912, what you will find is something very different from the film that Disney has made.
Burrough’s books are violent and somehow sexy.
They are more like a science fiction version of Conan The Barbarian than something you expect from the best director of Pixar.
All you really need to know is that most of the time in books, everyone is completely naked.
There is a reason for that, and it’s real a pivoting point, so very little is covered.
Avatar is PG-13 John Carter
AvatarWho “borrows” a large part of his intrigue of the John Carter books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, resolved part of this nudity problem by making his warrior characters slightly dressed in blue CGI extraterrestrials. In one way or another, it is more culturally acceptable, however, from my point of view, we do not know exactly why.
But Disney does not make this kind of films, so rather than opting for the hard PG-13 Ground Ground Cameron, they tried to sneak in a soft PG-13 family format.
And it didn’t work. No one took their children to see him. Ticket sales data afterwards revealed that most people who bought a ticket were over 25 years old.
Perhaps they should have told people that John Carter was the very first live film by Andrew Stanton, whose two previous films, Wall-e And Find Nemowere both the winners of the Oscars and the beloved instant classics.
However, Disney made very little of these achievements.
Since Disney was not going to make the gravelly and classified film that the author of the books could have wanted them to be, and they were not going to promote Andrew Stanton, they could rather have played the other forces of the script they had during advertising. They didn’t do this either.
In books and the film, John Carter is a story of adventure, yes, but that built around a romance between a princess and a commoner. However, Disney has never taken the trouble to tell its potential audience that there could be kisses.
More reasons to blame the avatar
Avatar was a huge success almost at the same time, and part of the reason Avatar Such a success is that he called on women as much or more than what he called on men. And once again, Avatar has stolen a large part of John CarterThe intrigue and several of the same rhythms are there.
AvatarThe trailers were not shy to play the angle of romance, creating Cameron’s film as a prohibited love story.
John CarterThe trailers have acted as if the film had been built mainly to create images that may well appear on the lunch box of a little boy.
There is very little romance in them and, worse, very little of the main female character of the film, already Thoris.
Already Thoris is a warrior scientist and undoubtedly the most important character in the film.
Young girls would do well to watch a character like already Thoris, but because of the film’s marketing, these girls probably did not realize that she was an important part of the story.
A Martian disorder
John Carter Opens with a restricted version of the Disney logo, bathed in red to honor the Martian location of the film.
This logo is the last framework even at a foreign distance that you will see in the film, because mainly it takes place in a sterile desert which could just as well have been in Utah … and as it was there that they fired it, in fact.
This is a problem because when you watch the trailers of the film and, indeed, while you watch the film, it is difficult to really feel the feeling of wonder that the film tries to transmit.
This problem also behaves in the extraterrestrial species that John Carter meets.
The Tharks seem completely foreign and, therefore, they are, without a doubt, the best part of the film.
But already Thoris and his people, whom Edgar Rice Burroughs described as the “red” people of Mars, mainly resembles humans who put a pile of tanning in aerosol, then all came out to have bad tattoos.
No matter how Disney could have marketed it, seen in small extracts, all of this ended up being far too familiar.
This is perhaps why the Disney marketing team has moved away from putting the front-past of already a very human human air and rather insisted to waste almost all their marketing to show a contextually minor battle between John Carter and the giant white and barsoomie monkeys.
But a shoot on an extraterrestrial planet should seem and feel different. It should be exciting, as something new you have to go see. Like a place where you want to be and explore. The world of John CarterFor all its charms, never feels exciting and new.
It may be possible to tell this story in a way that will lead people to see it, but the Disney team has never found it.
John Carter crashes
John Carter was a huge Disney investment, costing more than $ 260 million in production costs in 2012.
More than $ 100 million has been spent on the horrible film’s marketing campaign.
John Carter Open to number two, behind the animated film which does not really succeed LoraxIn his second week of release.
Things only worse from there.
Analysts believe that Disney has lost up to $ 250 million on the film.
And it was not exactly a success with criticism.
The criticisms were lukewarm, and while Roger Ebert, the largest in the world Spawn Fan, tried to find the positive points, he, like most criticism, gave him a mediocre note of intermediate level.
In the flop process, John Carter sang the career of actor Taylor Kitsch, who at the time was considered a hot up and a corner.
John Carter It was not the only science fiction disaster, just the biggest.
It was preceded a year earlier by the catastrophe of the box office of Cowboys and extraterrestrials.
But it was John CarterThe historical collapse that changed the trajectory of science fiction films in Hollywood.
In the years that followed, we have started to become darker and grainy, because once again, the studios have become more opposed to risk and returned to the well.
The era of launching massive budgets on experimental and optimistic adventure scripts is finished and shows no sign of return.
However, this does not mean that John Carter is not worth your time. For all its faults, Andrew Stanton’s film is very fun and the work of Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas is worth the entry cost alone.
And Burroughs’ books are always revolutionary and fantastic. They are part Conan the Barbarian and part Lost in space. Perhaps one day a better business will find a way to do them justice.
