Posted on 03/11/2012 1:32:54 PM PDT by jimbo123
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“John Carter,” a big-budget science fiction epic from Walt Disney Studios that opened Friday and flopped over the weekend. Disney spent lavishly (some say foolishly) on the movie in large part to keep one of its most important creative talents happy: Andrew Stanton, the Pixar-based director of “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E.”
“John Carter,” which cost an estimated $350 million to make and market, and was directed by Mr. Stanton, took in about $30.6 million at the North American box office, according to Rentrak, which compiles box-office data. That result is so poor, even when factoring in about $71 million in overseas ticket sales, that analysts estimate that Disney will be forced to take a quarterly write-down of $100 million to $165 million.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
A Harrison Ford Raiders type actor might have worked for the role.
If they wanted to go more serious, someone like Russell Crowe who has done a great job with period pieces but he is too old.
Taylor Kitsch is 30 years old. He did a pretty good job with Remy in Wolverine. His dialogue in the previews is painful to watch. Kind of like Keanu Reeves as Harker in Dracula.
Carson Napier of Venus was another good Burroughs series.
A Harrison Ford Raiders type actor might have worked for the role.
If they wanted to go more serious, someone like Russell Crowe who has done a great job with period pieces but he is too old.
Taylor Kitsch is 30 years old. He did a pretty good job with Remy in Wolverine. His dialogue in the previews is painful to watch. Kind of like Keanu Reeves as Harker in Dracula.
The MSM focuses on the budget of a movie too much. By their logic, you could have the #1 movie of the year be a bomb if it made a billion dollars but cost 2 billion to produce. The understood definition of a “bomb” is a movie no one goes to see, not one that just cost too much to make.
Last year, Mars Needs Moms was a bomb. It made $7 million opening weekend and $21 million total.
John Carter made $30 million in its opening weekend. That’s not a bomb, but it does mean the budget should have been half of what it was to be profitable. Prince of Persia opened with the exact same and ended up with $90 million, but made an unusually high amount overseas. These are B movies that were given A budgets. Anyone should have known this material shouldn’t justify this kind of budget, but it appears this was a vanity project as the first live-action movie for one of their top Pixar creators. Now that it’s out of his system, Disney will surely be happy to have him return to animation.
Agreed with your first two ideas.
And, “Taylor Kitsch”? Please, how could that ever work? “Taylor”? “Kitsch”? Can’t make that into a John Carter.
Ehrmmm... I see no reference to her (Traci Lords) in either of the two Dark Skies databases scanned thus far. Perhaps you were thinking of some other strumpet?
You guys are all criticizing this movie without having seen it. Basing everything on what some New York Times movie critic said.
How idiotic is that?
Nah, Russel Crowe has douchebagged out, he’s done.
They should have gone with Sam Worthington, the new Russel Crowe.
In Burrough’s book, Carter returned to Earth and made a fortune in pharmaceutical sales.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/oldadverts/4420231081/
Exactly. This movie may do quite well overseas...
Even that would have been a little better since it’s a unique name that clearly identifies the movie as sci-fi/fantasy of some sort. But a generic name like John Carter doesn’t communicate any useful information about the movie at all. If you’re going to use a proper name for a title that isn’t a well-known character, it needs to be a unique, fictional-sounding name like Forrest Gump. For a movie like this or Star Wars, though, a single name diminishes the movie no matter what because these are movies about whole worlds and large casts of characters, not just one man’s biography.
Saw it last night, it was much better than I had expected from the Dizzy Co.
The length of some of his leaps were a bit too much, and we now know that Mars gravity is not spectacularly less than Earth, but it was nice to see a movie for entertainment without some heavy-handed eco-nut message!
There is a bit of anti-war theme (Post civil-war disgust), but it is balanced by his accepting the necessity of the fight thrust upon him.
It was also nice that the manner in which “he” travelled to Barsoom was explained, something too often left out of newer stories.
I had the wrong series. She co starred in the “First Wave” series.
And Pellucidar. There was a really awful “At the Earth’s Core” made back in the 70’s with Doug McClure and Peter Cushing.
IT had potential.
On of my fave films as a kid was Robinson Crusoe On Mars
Most movies flop. And most flops don’t do a hundred million domestic/foreign on opening weekend.
Disney will lose a hundred fifty million on John Carter in the end.
Not a layoff scenario.
John is from Mars, Carson is from Venus?
Carson Napier was headed for Mars but crash landed on Venus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_Napier
agreed. Saw it yesterday in iMax 3D with my son, and we had a blast. FX, story line, action, villains and bad guys, battle scenes - i think this is Hollywood going after a studio that doesn’t toe the party line.
will buy with it comes out in blu-ray
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