By Joshua Tyler
| Published
In the long, storied history of Disney, the company has had massive successes, including the history-making Marvel Cinematic Universe and their entire animated output in the ’90s. More recently, they’ve suffered through a string of failures, derided by critics and ignored by moviegoers. Yet, Disney has yet to top 2012’s box office failure when the studio released the big-budget sci-fi adventure movie John Carter.
At the time of its release, John Carter held the dubious distinction of being the least profitable Disney film ever made. While recent movies like Snow White may soon challenge that record, John Carter was a trailblazer in epic failure.
A rollicking sci-fi adventure based on classic Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, John Carter should have been a massive success, but it never had a chance. This is why John Carter failed.
The World Of Barsoom
John Carter is about a disillusioned Civil War veteran mysteriously transported to Mars. Or as the planet’s residents call it, Barsoom.
On Barsoom, Carter discovers that thanks the the planet’s reduced gravity and thinner atmosphere, he has superhuman agility and strength. He quickly becomes embroiled in the conflicts among the various Martian races, including the humanoid Red Martians, the barbaric Green Martians, and the god-like Therns.
Along the way, Carter encounters and falls for Dejah Thoris, princess of the city-state of Helium. He teams up with her to help save her people from their rivals. It’s straightforward, old-fashioned hero stuff. For the most part, the movie pulls it off.
John Carter Should Have Been A Princess Of Mars
Whether John Carter’s movie pulled it off or not ultimately did not matter because no one bought a ticket to see it. John Carter was doomed to failure almost from the moment the words “John Carter” were added to the movie’s posters.
Originally, Disney was going to go with the far superior and more descriptive title John Carter of Mars, but they dropped “of Mars” early in the production process and went with only the very generic name of the film’s main character.
The Edgar Rice Burroughs novels on which the movie is based were more than 100 years old by the time John Carter was released.
Disney made almost no mention of the story’s origins and didn’t really play up the fact that it’s based on a classic at all.
So, no one knew who or what John Carter was, when Disney started promoting their big-budget blockbuster. And, as a movie title it’s hard to imagine something more boring and non-desciptive than “John Carter”.
And it’s not as if there weren’t other titles available.
The first book in the Burroughs series is called A Princess of Mars, and 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 imaginable and expected that to pique people’s interest.
Dropping all possible connections to the books may have been intentional.
For their John Carter movie, Disney toned down the very R-rated content of the books, in a clear effort to make it as family-friendly as possible. They likely didn’t want parents the original and thinking that their movie version might not be intended for kids.
Should you read the books Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about John Carter back in 1912, what you’ll find is something very different from the movie Disney made out of it.
Burroughs’ books are violent and sort of sexy.
They’re more like a sci-fi version of Conan the Barbarian than something you’d expect from the top director at Pixar.
All you really need to know is that most of the time in the books, everyone is completely naked.
There’s a reason for it, and it’s actual a pivotal plot point, so very little is covered up.
Avatar Is PG-13 John Carter
Avatar, which “borrows” much of its plot from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter books, solved some of this nudity issue by making its scantily clothed warrior characters into blue CGI aliens. Somehow, that’s more culturally acceptable, though, from my vantage point, it’s not exactly clear why.
But Disney doesn’t make those kinds of movies, so rather than going for the hard PG-13 middle ground Cameron found, they tried to squeeze into a soft PG-13 family-friendly format.
And it didn’t work. No one took their kids to see it. Ticket sales data after the fact revealed that most of those who did buy a ticket were over the age of 25.
Maybe they should have told people that John Carter was the first-ever live-action film from Andrew Stanton, whose previous two films, WALL-E and Finding Nemo, were both Oscar winners and beloved instant classics.
Yet Disney made very little of those achievements.
Since Disney wasn’t going to make the gritty, rated-R movie the books’ author might have wanted them to be, and they weren’t going to promote Andrew Stanton, they could instead have played up the other strengths of the script they had while advertising it. They didn’t do that either.
In both the books and the film, John Carter is an adventure story, yes, but one built around a romance between a princess and a commoner. Yet, Disney never bothered to tell its potential audience there might be kissing.
More Reasons To Blame Avatar
Avatar was a huge hit around this same time, and part of the reason Avatar was such a success is that it appealed to women as much or more than it appealed to men. And again, Avatar stole much of John Carter’s plot and many of the same beats are there.
Avatar’s trailers weren’t shy about playing up the romance angle, crafting Cameron’s film as a tale of forbidden love.
John Carter’s trailers acted as though the film was constructed primarily to create pictures that might look good on a little boy’s lunchbox.
There’s very little romance in them and worse, very little of the film’s strong, take-charge lead female character Dejah Thoris.
Dejah Thoris is a warrior scientist and arguably the movie’s most important character.
Young girls would do well to look up to a character like Dejah Thoris, but because of the movie’s marketing, those girls probably didn’t realize she was an important part of the story.
A Martian Mess
John Carter opens with a retooled version of the Disney logo, bathed in red to honor the movie’s Martian location.
That logo is the last even remotely alien-looking setting you’ll see in the film, since mostly it’s set in a barren desert which could just as easily have been in Utah… and since that’s where they shot it, actually was.
That’s a problem because when you look at the movie’s trailers and indeed to some extent while you’re watching the movie, it’s hard to really feel the sense of wonder the film is trying to convey.
That problem carries over to the alien species John Carter encounters too.
The Tharks look completely alien and as a result, they are, without a doubt, the best part of the movie.
But Dejah Thoris and her people, whom Edgar Rice Burroughs described as the “red” people of Mars, mostly look like humans who put on a bunch of spray tan and then all went out to get bad tattoos.
No matter how Disney might have marketed it, seen in small snippets, this all ends up looking far too familiar.
Perhaps that’s why the Disney marketing team shied away from putting the very humdrum human-looking Dejah Thoris front and center and instead insisted on wasting almost all of their marketing on showing off a contextually minor battle between John Carter and giant, Barsoomian white apes.
But a movie set on an alien planet should look and feel different. It should feel exciting, like something new you have to go see. Like someplace you want to be and explore. The world of John Carter, for all its charms, never feels exciting and new.
It might be possible to tell this story in a way that will actually get people to see it, but Disney’s team never found it.
John Carter Crashes
John Carter was a huge investment by Disney, costing over $260 million in production costs back in 2012.
More than $100 million was spent on the movie’s horrific marketing campaign.
John Carter opened at number two, behind the not actually all that successful animated movie The Lorax, in its second week of release.
Things only got worse from there.
Analysts estimate Disney lost as much as $250 million on the movie.
And it wasn’t exactly a hit with critics.
Reviews were tepid, and while Roger Ebert, the world’s biggest Spawn fan, tried to find the positives in it, he, like most critics, gave it a mediocre middle-level star rating.
In the process of flopping, John Carter tanked the career of actor Taylor Kitsch, who at the time was viewed as a hot up and comer.
John Carter wasn’t the only sci-fi disaster, just the biggest.
It was preceded just a year earlier by the box office disaster of Cowboys and Aliens.
But it was John Carter’s historic collapse that changed the trajectory of sci-fi films in Hollywood.
In the years that followed, we started getting darker, more gritty sci-fi, as again, studios became more risk-averse and returned to the well.
The era of throwing massive budgets at experimental, upbeat adventure scripts is over and shows no sign of coming back.
It doesn’t mean, however, that John Carter isn’t 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 admission alone.
And Burroughs’s books are still groundbreaking and fantastic. They’re part Conan the Barbarian and part Lost in Space. Maybe someday a better company will find a way to do them justice.
