It is a brave man who takes on the responsibility of selecting the video/DVD for a Friday night gathering. Such a man should be praised for having steel in his blood.
Below is a longish essay on the film, basically saying it was one of the biggest calamities in Hollywood history.
The Failure of John Carter (of Mars)
It cost $2.6 million per each minute of its running time. Its projected $200 million losses have forced the head of Disney to resign. It’s being called the most high-profile disaster since ‘Heaven’s Gate’. What the hell happened with ‘John Carter of Mars’?
‘John Carter’ was released worldwide 9th March 2012. A Walt Disney Studios production, it had cost $350 million to make. To see success, Disney was looking for another ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’ (2006). A sequel to 2003’s phenomenally popular ‘Curse of the Black Pearl’, ‘Dead Man’s Chest’ had cost $225 million but made $135 million in its opening weekend alone; it was poised to make a profit. A bountiful opening weekend is always a good sign – eventual takings reached over $1 billion.
‘John Carter’ made $30 million in its opening weekend. Now at the end of its cinematic run, it has only just clawed back its production budget, with other costs such as marketing and distribution still unaccounted for. From a declared cost of $350 million, ‘John Carter’ has made little over $260 million. The new ‘Dead Man’s Chest’ it isn’t – by all accounts, this is one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.
Hollywood’s past is littered with box office disasters, often the result of low audience figures failing to recuperate the cost of a production that ran well over budget. Examples abound: ‘Cleopatra’ (1963), ‘Sorcerer’ (1977), ‘Ishtar’ (1987), ‘Cutthroat Island’ (1995), ‘The Adventures of Pluto Nash’ (2002)…and the big one, ‘Heaven’s Gate’ (1980).
Epic Western ‘Heaven’s Gate’ was “the film that bankrupted a studio”. Its failure was so massive that United Artists was bought out shortly after the film’s release and director Michael Cimino effectively became an outcast, a once-promising filmmaker reduced to nothing by his egomania and reckless spending. ‘Heaven’s Gate’ – $44 million cost, $3 million audience takings – is still a byword for box office failure. It stands as a warning from history; such is the infamy of its troubled production, it’s surprising a caution sign baring Cimino’s face doesn’t stand at every street corner in Hollywood.
Andrew Stanton, like Cimino, was once a Hollywood golden boy. Where Cimino was the Oscar-winning genius behind ‘The Deerhunter’ (1978), Stanton had gold statues of his own for both ‘Wall.E’ (2008) and ‘Finding Nemo’ (2003). It was him that brought the ‘John Carter of Mars’ project to Disney after years of futile attempts to bring it to the screen – as early as 1936, MGM were planning an animated ‘John Carter’ feature, while Ray Harryhausen, John McTiernan and Robert Rodriguez all had a go at one point or another. Stanton, a longtime fan of the books, was to be the one to finally realise the project.
Based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘Barsoom’ sci-fi novels, ‘John Carter of Mars’ tells the story of confederate soldier John Carter inadvertently teleporting from 1868 Arizona to Mars, where he finds himself in the middle of a thousand-year war between alien tribes. The 11-book series, written between 1912 and 1943, was possible franchise material, a fantasy adventure for the whole family. It was the kind of material Stanton had already proven so adept at; he enticed Disney with the promise of “Indiana Jones on Mars”.
With an acclaimed cast including Samantha Morton, Mark Strong and Dominic West locked in, shooting for ‘John Carter of Mars’ began at London’s Longcross Studios, January 2010 and concluded in Utah, July 2010. It was Stanton’s first ever live-action shoot – a former Pixar man, he’d written, directed and produced some of the studio’s greatest hits – and filming didn’t run entirely smoothly. A whole month’s re-shoot took place in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, re-shoots often the sign of a troubled production. Stanton even admitted to filming much of the movie twice, remarking that he’d been taught how to make movies that sometimes required up to four re-shoots. He defiantly transferred his animated filmmaking methods to live-action, saying “You’re asking a guy who’s only known how to do it this way…I’m not gonna get it right the first time, I’ll tell you that right now.”
You could be forgiven for thinking, then, that much of the film’s final cost was sunk into shooting and re-shooting it several times, though Stanton insists it came in on budget. If the shoot was troubled, the director at least sought advice – not from live-action crews, but from the people he worked with at Pixar. He gave his reasoning to his producers: “Is it just me, or do we actually know how to do this better than live-action crews do?”
With the $250 million-shoot completed by mid-2010, the editing and – most importantly – the selling of the film could begin. An early decision was to remove ‘of Mars’ from the title, an idea of MT Carney’s, Disney’s head of marketing during ‘John Carter’s post-production (Carney, whose only previous experience was running a small marketing boutique in New York, later appeared to be forced out of the company, declaring her ‘resignation’ earlier this year). The title change would be the first of many confused marketing decisions.
