One unknown story tells how Walt Disney Studios invested over US$360 million to create the science fiction action, John Carter. The movie which had its debut in 2012, failed at the US market premiere, and even though it made historic records in Russia, it became one of the biggest box office bombs that the industry has ever seen. Why did the movie fail and how huge was the financial windfall?
The Overworked Novel
The movie was based on the 1912 novel Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burrough, the first book of the Barsoom series. The story tells of an American cowboy who mined the Arizonian caves in search of gold. During one of his ventures, he discovers a secret gateway device that brings him to Mars. Here he falls in love with a Martian princess and joins in the defense of his planet from civil war and destruction.
There have been many attempts to create movies from this series since the 1930s, but each failed, including one by Walt Disney in 1980. Most critics have concluded that it was rather difficult to adapt the novel to modern science, a concept that not even the studio itself could deny.
However, three other movies, Star Wars, Dune, and Avatar, had already been taken from these novels. As one critic said, “The film was doomed from the start since those works had so thoroughly appropriated the source material as to assure that modern audience would see John Carter as unoriginal.”
Pixar Studios, John Carter, and the Queen
In 2009, famed director Andrew Stanton asked Walt Disney to review Burrough’s screenplay rights and convinced the studio to move forward once again with the project. He already had a few good Pixar animations under his belt like Finding Nemo (2003) and Wall-E (2008), so Disney accepted, and the filming started in 2010.
Disney received a further boost of almost US$50 million from the British crown in approval of London’s good gestures for royalty-related films. There was no turning back.
On March 9, 2012, Walt Disney Motion Picture released John Carter in the US which was met with mixed reaction. The applauses came up for the visual effects, the action sequence, and the unforgettable musical themes. However, viewers had no thumbs up for the characterizations nor the plot, and the American public turned its back on John Carter. The movie still remains the biggest box office loss of all time.
How Much Did Walt Disney Lose?
The film cost over US$360 million, making it one of the most expensive films ever made. Director Andrew Stanton had planned two sequels to the movie, Gods of Mars and Warlords of Mars. Facing a US$200 million writedown, Disney canceled the serials.
More critics believed that the movie’s failure had more to do with its marketing campaign than with the set shortcomings. Some cited the failure to draw public attention by eliminating phrases like ‘war princess’ or ‘tribal war’, or words like ‘mars’, from the title. Concluding that just saying ‘John Carter’ was not enough to promote a film that seems to copy from Avatar, Star Trek, or Alien.
The film did rather poorly at the worldwide box office where it grossed US$284 million. For Walt Disney, the film was a box office bomb, but for the Russian public, it was a theatrical success.
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I always thought something was fishy about that movie, how it died so quickly. Yeah, I guess that makes sense, just too many movies snatched from the same novel.