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Thread: John Carter - Uh-Oh!

  1. #1
    Registered User dban3's Avatar
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    John Carter - Uh-Oh!

    It could be just me but I got to say the previews and trailers of the upcoming Disney release of John Carter look absolutely dreadful. The rumored cost to Disney - $250,000,000 (that's a quarter of a billion dollars).

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    The footage they showed at the D23 convention last year was actually pretty good. I'm just not sure I'm interested enough in the story to see the movie.

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    Registered User arnoldvb's Avatar
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    I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs back in the '70s (when I was in my 20s) and just ate up all of his novels, especially the Barsoom, Venus, and Pellucidar series. If they stick to Burroughs' vision and don't try to make it "hip" I'll probably like "John Carter."


  5. #4

    I'm not really an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, so I don't know very much about the background for John Carter. We've seen the trailer several times, and without much knowledge of the storyline, it doesn't sway us one way or the other. But, we are Andrew Stanton fans, so we may well see this film based on that alone.


  6. #5

    The $250 Million is including marketing, by the way, which normally doesn't get calculated into a film's official budget. Regardless, though, I feel this movie is being grossly betrayed by its marketing, the people who have seen real footage from the film say pretty much unanimously that it looks incredible and that the trailers don't do it any sort of justice. Plus the head of marketing for the film was just fired so that says something right there.

    Either way, though, this is Andrew Stanton we are talking about. This is the man who gave us Finding Nemo and WALL•E (as well as being a major part of the first two Toy Story movies and A Bug's Life) and in my book that gives him the benefit of the doubt. I, for one, will be at John Carter on opening night and expect nothing less than to be blown away. I just hope other people don't pass on what is sure to be a fantastic film simply because of poor marketing.


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    Not really a fan of the Barsoom books. I appreciate them for their place in adventure/sci fi history but not so much as actual fun reading.

    I have faith in Andrew Stanton so I'm hopeful but the trailer does look awful and (the connection being obvious) mostly like Conan on Mars (when we already had Conan on Earth a few months ago).


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    Registered User dban3's Avatar
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    After watching the John Carter trailer about a half dozen times during yesterdays NFL Championship games, you would think they would have had time to come up with a better trailer than the ones that keep circulating. It does have that Conan / Cowboys and Aliens look about it.

    Other thoughts -
    If Disney thought the movie had blockbuster written all over it wouldn't they have looked for a summer release date? Then again, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland was released in March (but it featured a very bankable star). Disney's first release (under the Disney name) of Marvel's The Avengers stands to be 2012's real money-maker.

    There is the rumor that part of the reason for the huge budget for John Carter was because the movie needed quite a bit of re-shooting. Never a good sign

    A lot of faith in Andrew Stanton expressed here although he has Director credit in only 2 Pixar's films- Granted, Time magazine had Stanton's Wall-E as Best Film of the Decade and our top Bay Area film critic wrote that for the first 55 minutes it may well have been the best film ever made (selling its soul to a certain extent to introduce the human element). But Stanton also directed Finding Nemo which is probably my least favorite Pixar film relying on the standard misfit in peril formula. Stanton's other credits were primarily writing other Pixar films (and he was the voice of Crush).

    There is a back story (rumor) that one of the reasons Disney stopped production for a time last year on The Lone Ranger was they were just coming off lessons learned from John Carter and never letting a film's budget get out of control to that extent again.

    There was a time a few years back when Disney (and other film studios) could count on post release sales of DVD and Blu-Rays of their big budget releases to supplement profits and justify budgets. A trip to your local Wal-Mart shows the retail sales of DVD's and Blu-Rays are dying. In a floundering economy, owning copies of movies has taken a back seat to keeping households running.

    But John Carter has to do better than Mars Needs Moms for Disney, right? From the looks of it. I'm not so sure.

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  9. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by dban3 View Post
    ...A lot of faith in Andrew Stanton expressed here although he has Director credit in only 2 Pixar's films- Granted, Time magazine had Stanton's Wall-E as Best Film of the Decade and our top Bay Area film critic wrote that for the first 55 minutes it may well have been the best film ever made (selling its soul to a certain extent to introduce the human element). But Stanton also directed Finding Nemo which is probably my least favorite Pixar film relying on the standard misfit in peril formula. Stanton's other credits were primarily writing other Pixar films (and he was the voice of Crush)...
    Well, Brad Bird had only directed 2 films for Pixar ("The Incredibles" & "Ratouille," which wasn't even his project originally), and both films were excellent. His move to live action ("Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol") was most welcome and critically acclaimed. So, I can hope that my faith in Andrew Stanton (and, for the record, I really liked "Wall-E" and "Nemo") is not misplaced.

  10. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by dban3 View Post
    If Disney thought the movie had blockbuster written all over it wouldn't they have looked for a summer release date? Then again, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland was released in March (but it featured a very bankable star). Disney's first release (under the Disney name) of Marvel's The Avengers stands to be 2012's real money-maker.
    March has, for some inexplicable reason, become like a sneak preview for summer. The last few years have seen several big blockbuster releases in March including: Watchmen, Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, The Hunger Games, Wrath of the Titans, and yes, John Carter. I'm not sure what the reason for this is, but releasing a blockbuster in March seems to be a steadily growing trend. Also, it's worth pointing out that I expect The Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be the two biggest earners of 2012, not The Avengers.

    There is the rumor that part of the reason for the huge budget for John Carter was because the movie needed quite a bit of re-shooting. Never a good sign
    Stanton has talked at length about this. He says that part of the Pixar process (and a large part of the reason their films are so good) is that they are not afraid to make 11th hour changes in order to make sure the story is the best it can be. In fact, Toy Story 2 (arguably one of the best sequels of all time) was essentially rebuilt from scratch with less than a year before the release date. The reshoots are his way of translating that process to live action, and yes, it's pricey, but I wouldn't count it as a bad sign, it's par for the course with a Pixar director.

    A lot of faith in Andrew Stanton expressed here although he has Director credit in only 2 Pixar's films
    He also has a co-directing credit on A Bug's Life and either writing or producing credits on just about every other Pixar film. I think he knows what he's doing.

    There is a back story (rumor) that one of the reasons Disney stopped production for a time last year on The Lone Ranger was they were just coming off lessons learned from John Carter and never letting a film's budget get out of control to that extent again.
    First of all, production of The Loan Ranger never stopped because it hadn't even started yet; Disney was still in pre-production haggling over a budget with Gore Verbinski and Jerry Bruckheimer. Second of all, the budget that Verbinski and Bruckheimer initially wanted was $50 million more than what John Carter cost, and that's crazy numbers for a Western, not so much for a Sci-fi/Adventure film. I wouldn't put too much stock in this rumor, the two seem to be completely unrelated.

    There was a time a few years back when Disney (and other film studios) could count on post release sales of DVD and Blu-Rays of their big budget releases to supplement profits and justify budgets. A trip to your local Wal-Mart shows the retail sales of DVD's and Blu-Rays are dying. In a floundering economy, owning copies of movies has taken a back seat to keeping households running.
    True, over all purchases were down over last year, DVD and Blu-Ray are far from dying. In fact Blu-Ray sales were reportedly up 20% in 2011. Disney still makes plenty on home media sales, not to mention the licensing profits they get from companies like Red Box and Netflix which are continuing to rapidly increase in business.

    Bottom line is that marketing really does not have a lot to do with a film's quality. The Iron Giant, for instance, did poorly at the box office and was sabotaged by misguided marketing practices, but is a bonafide classic and is considered by many to be one of the best animated movies of all time. The Nightmare Before Christmas also had poor box-office attendance, but it is now a huge property that is one of Disney's biggest money-makers. Andrew Stanton said in an interview that his goal with John Carter was simply to make the best movie he could rather than making the most profitable movie he could, and while he hopes that it is a box office hit, he has faith that if the movie is good enough the audience will come, maybe not right away, but over time. He said that he would rather make a movie that people continue to watch and enjoy 5, 10, even 20 years from now than a movie that makes a killing at the box office and is quickly forgotten.

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    Quote Originally Posted by IllusionOfLife View Post
    March has, for some inexplicable reason, become like a sneak preview for summer. The last few years have seen several big blockbuster releases in March
    Actually, the March release date has been around for some time. "The Hunt For Red October" was the first notable one. Prior to that, the studios avoided March for big releases cause they figured people weren't interested in movies at that time, or at least weren't interested in anything other than Oscar fare. And then someone figured out that if there wasn't anything non-Oscar for people to see, they could do well with a good new film being released in that time frame. "Hunt" was definitely a blockbuster success and opened a lot of eyes to a March release date.
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    To me, March = Spring Break - which is important for a key demographic the movie studies are looking for.

    Cathy

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    Just armchair hypothesizing.

    To the extent that "blockbuster" releases have been moving out their traditional windows I wonder how much that is driven by the trend seen in the graph below (in spoiler tags because it is big). I made that using data from BoxOfficeMojo.

    It shows the average percentage of total domestic box office, for the top 25 grossing movies of each year, that was earned in the first weekend of release.

    In 1985 when the average big movie only earned 15% of its money in the first weekend, you were releasing movies with a many weeks (and possibly multiple months) strategy. And in that environment, the prolonged period of kids out of school for the summer is a good feature of the calendar to take advantage of.

    But in 2010 when 28% of your nut comes in the first weekend that is much less important. The majority of the money is going to be made in a couple weekends. So the Spring Break window would, I think, become increasingly enticing and even other non-summer long holiday weekends. And when the goal is not to build word of mouth over time but rather to market as many butts into the seats on day one as possible, getting away from the most crowded period (and into cheaper advertising windows) would be a boon.

     


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    Ready for MA World Explorers! Drince88's Avatar
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    Sounds logical to me, Alex!

    Cathy

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    Quote Originally Posted by Alex S. View Post
    Just armchair hypothesizing.

    To the extent that "blockbuster" releases have been moving out their traditional windows I wonder how much that is driven by the trend seen in the graph below (in spoiler tags because it is big). I made that using data from BoxOfficeMojo.

    It shows the average percentage of total domestic box office, for the top 25 grossing movies of each year, that was earned in the first weekend of release.

    In 1985 when the average big movie only earned 15% of its money in the first weekend, you were releasing movies with a many weeks (and possibly multiple months) strategy. And in that environment, the prolonged period of kids out of school for the summer is a good feature of the calendar to take advantage of.

    But in 2010 when 28% of your nut comes in the first weekend that is much less important. The majority of the money is going to be made in a couple weekends. So the Spring Break window would, I think, become increasingly enticing and even other non-summer long holiday weekends. And when the goal is not to build word of mouth over time but rather to market as many butts into the seats on day one as possible, getting away from the most crowded period (and into cheaper advertising windows) would be a boon.
     

    Armchair pondering here…

    Interesting chart and theory. There is always some truth in numbers just like there is truth beyond the numbers as well.

    From a distance, I tend to believe that major studios ‘blockbuster’ summer releases (basically the week before Memorial Day to about mid-July) are usually bankable movies. At worst they will break even and at best they will have studio executives and accountants merrily skipping all the way to the bank. To a lesser extent, the second major release window shows up in the period Thanksgiving to Christmas (though the juggernauts of Titanic and Avatar released in this time frame). This is also the window where studios choose to release most of their “award season” films though mass audiences tend to stay away from those in droves (editorial comment).

    So now we have the spring release window, for Disney this year it’s the John Carter release. Can we garner any information at all about what Disney thinks about the movie from its spring release date? Check the major Disney releases from the last two March’s. 2010, Alice in Wonderland, a box office shocker that even took Disney by surprise to the tune of over a billion dollars in box office receipts. Personally, I hated the movie but that’s neither here nor there. Move up to 2011, the Disney produced Robert Zemeckis’ ImageMovers Digital film Mars Needs Moms, a movie Disney knew was so bad the company cancelled the remainder of Zemeckis’ 10 year 4 picture deal after only 2 releases BEFORE the movie was released (the guy in the cubicle next to mine here at work – his brother-in-law was one of the multitude of special effects supervisors for the Zemeckis - Disney collaborations). According to a reliable source (Wikipedia), MNM net loss was a staggering $136,000,000 (plus some change).

    We don’t really know too much about Disney’s John Carter other than it seems to be a victim of a poor marketing campaign to this point. Is it a visual masterpiece garnered from the fertile imagination of one of Pixar’s key creative masterminds (though Pixar genius took a hit on Cars 2)? Or is it a 21st century over produced excessive special effects assault on classic science fiction stories written more than 50 years ago by an author whose most famous character is Tarzan. Time will tell but I can’t help but feel that John Carter’s success or failure (and we’re talking box office success / failure as opposed to artistic success / failure) will have a major impact on how Disney looks at big budget films in the future. Hollywood tea leaf readers say it already has.
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  16. #15

    Indeed, if a $200 million dollar blockbuster falls on its face in terms of box office return it will simply reinforce the negative idea that only sequels, reboots, and remakes will sell. Unfortunately Disney won't say "oh, we just need to market it better next time," instead they'll say "well that's it, no more passion projects for us. If it's not a sequel it's not getting made." This is, of course, an incredibly silly position to take, but that's the conclusion that the suits will jump to; this is one of many reasons why I want John Carter to succeed.

    P.S. I also noticed in my last post that I referred to The Lone Ranger as "The Loan Ranger." Clearly I've worked at a credit union too long… >.<


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    I just got tickets to the Premier in LA through D23. I guess we'll see how it is. I'm pretty excited as we get places on the red carpet and I'm sure some kind of goodies. At the least, it's a half day off work and free movie!

    But I don't want to go among mad people!

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    We're anxiously awaiting this film. We're hoping it does so well that Disney will rethink Avatar land for possibly Barsoom land.

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  19. #18

    Here's an interview with Andrew Stanton. This man knows his stuff. This movie is going to be incredible.


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    Here's yesterday's deadline.com story. Reports like these never end up turning out for the good.

    http://www.deadline.com/2012/02/john...e/#more-229292

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    Andrew Stanton was on CNN this morning with Solidad O'Brien talking about John Carter. Hopefully this kind of exposure will help at the box office. I know I'm definitely looking forward to seeing it, since I'm familiar with the Edgar Rice Burroughs books.


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    Al Lutz posted a link a Forbes - John Carter article earlier this week...

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpin...t-but-disneys/

    It's beginning to look like no one will allow John Carter to take the middle ground - to be a good entertaining movie that will please most of the people who take the time and plunk down the money to see it. Instead, this movie is being dogged by bad press. There are two camps seemingly heading on a collision course, the fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs who authored the science fiction classic along with director Andrew Stanton and his impressive contributions at Pixar and on the other side are those who look at corporate Disney bankrolling a movie that cost a quarter of a billion dollars, inflated by expensive re-shoots and cost overruns. Too often, movie executives come off as a smug group thinking themselves the smartest guys in the room. Well when you put yourself in that position there are always people who want to take you down a peg and love to see you get your comeuppance.

    For whatever reason, John Carter is wearing a bulls-eye on its back and a lot of people are waiting to see if Carter is about to count itself in with some of the great movie train wrecks of all time (Ishtar, Heaven's Gate, Waterworld, Pluto Nash, etc.).

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    Quote Originally Posted by dban3 View Post
    For whatever reason, John Carter is wearing a bulls-eye on its back and a lot of people are waiting to see if Carter is about to count itself in with some of the great movie train wrecks of all time (Ishtar, Heaven's Gate, Waterworld, Pluto Nash, etc.).
    Waterworld didn't really lose any money (because it did well overseas and was so pre-sold that was almost no risk) so from a financial perspective, a Waterworld result wouldn't be awful.

  24. #23

    That's a good point. International box office is often a huge deal (for example, American audiences realized that Pirates 4 was terrible and didn't give it more than couple hundred million dollars while the international audiences helped it cross the $1 Billion mark). Most of the (completely unjustified) negative buzz surrounding John Carter seems to be state-side, perhaps it still has a shot of doing great overseas?


  25. #24
    Sweet Spot - we miss you! shna's Avatar
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    I've never heard of the books - so I was just confused when I started hearing the title. I wondered why/how they were making a film about Noah Wyle's ER character. I just looked at the Wikipedia page about the character & none of the book titles sounds even vaguely familiar. Are these books widely known among any of the target demographic groups for the movie (unless the demographic is "the people who have read the books")?

    Being that I have no pre-made connection to the story, I have pretty much zero desire to see the film. If it gets great reviews & does well at the box office, I may watch it when it comes around on cable. *shrug*

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    I'm not a huge fan of the books but growing up I was hugely aware of them because it seemed like all of my favorite science fiction authors were huge fans of them. No idea if that is still true another generation later.


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