I hope they don’t make JC a steroid-monkey looking muscle freak. He was a Confederate cavalryman and the greatest swordsman of two worlds. A lean, muscular build rather than bodybuilder bulk would be more in keeping with that image.
I thought Disney and Pixar weren’t partners anymore. Didn’t Pixar break away with the agreement to do 3 more movies for Disney, which (I think) they’ve already completed?
Disney bought Pixar which kind of side-stepps any previous agreements they had.
Brian
Yup. Disney bought Pixar effective May 5, 2006. Disney wisely retained the Pixar brand name, though.
Don’t know much about John Carter or Barsoom, but just about everything Pixar does, they do well. I think and hope they can do a good job with this, too. I’d rather it be entirely digitized, though, in a photorealistic way like The Incredibles or Ratatouille.
Not quite as smiple as that, I think. Steve Job’s is a major shareholder in Disney now and sits on the board of Disney.
When John Carter is forced to hide in the giant prize machine, he discovers them and they promptly begin worshipping him like a god.
What? It’s Pixar, fer chrissakes! You know that’s what they’re going to do it!
Yeah, it will all be animated. Not just animated, but CGI cutesey animated, all smooth, clean, non-reflective and plastic-looking…
Any bets on who will voice John Carter? Tom Hanks? Sylvester Stallone? Bruce Willis? Robin Williams?
How about Deeja Thoris? Angelina Jolie? Susan Sarandon? Bette Midler?
I bet they’ll introduce a comic-relief character too… Someone short and fat who makes pop-culture referencing wisecracks…
They retained a lot more than just the brand name. Essentially, Disney paid Pixar to take over their animation department. John Lassiter is still in charge, and reportedly has just as much control over Pixar as a subdivision of Disney as he had when it was an independent corporation.
Neither The Incredibles nor Ratatouille were photorealistic. The upcoming CGI Beowulf movie is photorealistic, which is to say, the animation looks like a photograph, not a cartoon.
BMax, I assume you’ve never actually seen a Pixar movie?
Hmm, all this talk has me itching to revisit the novels; I haven’t read A Princess of Mars in a few years and the others in even longer, and clearly my memory is fuzzy.
For some reason I’ve always pictured Luke Wilson for John Carter. At any rate, whoever plays him has to be a man; an Orlando Bloom-esque pretty boy won’t cut it, nor will a muscle-bound giant like The Rock.
I don’t know about animating the whole thing. I think it would take away a lot of the sex appeal of the novel. Sure, it’d be easier to craft the perfect Dejah Thoris out of polygons… but I feel like it’d be more effective if it were an actual woman.
The passage quoted by silenus just reminds me how difficult of a part she’ll be to cast. She won’t feel right to me unless she looks like a Frazetta painting is walking around on screen… and, well, how many women in Hollywood have curves like this? That’s about all she should be wearing, besides, and I don’t find that too likely either.
Although that doesn’t really match the book’s description: “a slender, girlish figure”, unless Dejah Thoris was about 15 earth-years old when Carter first saw her.
Allow me to add another candidate for the incomparable Dejah Thoris: Thandie Newton. Exotic looking, great figure, and she can act (unfortunately, she can’t seem to pick a decent role to save her life). Mind you, I’m not saying that the other candidates can’t act, but I think we all agree that the ability to do so is an important part of the role.
Dejah—>Zhang Ziyi. Martian swordplay hotness.
Actually…
I mean, it’s not like Dejah Thoris really has any great range of nuanced emotions to express. It’s pretty much “Help!” and "Thank you!’ isn’t it?
Of course, if you include all the Barsoomian women, you also add “Eww, what low-class rock did you crawl out from under?” and (this is the hard one) the “Well, OK I guess you are cool”.
Really I think the only requirement is having flashing eyes and haughtiness at appropriate moments.
That and the egg. Good gad, what are they going to do about the egg?
Have Horton sit on it?
Who?
I hear you.
“Slender, girlish” in ERB’s day was a heftier babe than “slender, girlish” means today. In his day, girls and women worked – they had muscles and a smoothing layer of fat over, much like the picture in the provided link. Those are muscular thighs. What slender means today would be unappealingly skinny in ERB’s time.
As a straight female, who hasn’t read the Barsoom books but has soaked up Heinlein’s love of them from The Number of the Beast, I’m more interested in what John Carter will look like. Agreed, not a pretty boy, with the kind of muscles that develop naturally from activity, not the gross muscles that come from the gym.
(Hope it was okay for a female to enter this very masculine fantasy fest. Your fascination with boobs is a never-ending source of bemusement for me. I just don’t get it, but have noticed that when i wear a wonderbra, I get extra attention and better service wherever hetero men abound.)
It could go either way. 
Don’t forget that when Dejah Thoris first met ol’ JC she told him that he wasn’t fit to feed her cat (or similar insult). And really, it takes brains to pull off the kind of hotness that is the incomparable Dejah.
As proof of this, I offer the fact that both Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe were highly intelligent women who became sex symbols and are still popular all these years after their deaths. Contrast that with Britney Spears who’s an idiot, no longer a sex symbol and more famous for being a trainwreck than she was for being a singer.
Tapiotar, inject away! The last thing any of us want is for JC to be some kind of “Nancy boy.” He’s got to be somebody who can take having the crap beat out of him, and then grab a sword and proceed to slaughter his opponents by the thousands. Orlando Bloom couldn’t do it. Daniel Craig, Clive Owen (and possibly Vin Diesel) could do it.
Spoken like a man who has never watched a Pixar film.