That argument has been made before, but it doesn’t convince me very much. I could argue the same way about westerns – they all have the same elements, some of which were originally introduced by others. Why the hell should anyone make a new Western? It’s all been done before.
But they keep coming out.
John Carter suffered from criminal neglect in not being promoted and advertised sufficiently or well. Not because action-adventure Sf has been done before
What are the chances of anything coming from Mars? Must be a million-to-one …
because it’s Angry.
Well that’s what they say. But still …
When DC releases its J’onn J’onzz: Manhunter from Mars movie, it will make a billion dollars if done right.
Full discloser. When I was a kid in the 1950s I spent hours trying to figure out how to pronounce J’onn J’onzz.
I spent hours trying to figure out his attraction. I never “got” The Martian Manhunter. He seemed like a pointless, duplicate Superman, only bakld and green, with that ridiculous weakness to fire. As they drew him in JLA he looked like just an ordinary, well-built guy (though green and bald), unlike his feature stories, wher he had that huge supraorbital brow.
He had a few weird powers, like being able to see around corners, but they never added up to anything worthwhile
But still they come.
He was to Superman was The Green Arrow was to Batman, a steal from themselves before one of the other companies did. Not that many other companies even bothered to try with superheroes mostly dead at the time. One of the many reasons I dumped DC for Marvel as soon as I hit my teens, though Stan Lee made that timing fortuitous.
The modern version has lots of fascination, a far better backstory and no idiot earthman disguise. He’s as powerful as anyone in the JLA and in some ways more feared than Superman since he can mess with your brain. It’s that movie I’m thinking of.
Remember the action figure of Alien?
The same reason restaurants on the moon fail: a complete lack of atmosphere.
It’s Gigeriffic!
It has a good university, though. Otis Sistrunk went there.
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.
I have high hopes that The Martian will be about tech and problem-solving, with Maatt Damon allowed to play Watney as sardonic instead of heroic, not just more CGI wankery.
We listened to the audio book on a recent road trip, and I really enjoyed it.
But, there’s no way that the book could be translated into a mass-market movie, without significant re-writing. I was constantly aware at how much of the book is arithmetic - calories required per day, liters of Oxygen, Watts of energy. If you made the movie as the book was written, most of the audience would be bored to tears, and the rest would be looking for math errors.
It won’t be. 
It will be dark, grim, and gritty, with lots of incomprehensible over the top fights. DC no longer knows how to make fun films.
I really didn’t think it was a math book, but about Watney’s ingenuity and persistence, and his ability to shut out the fear of death with humor and sardonicism and simple denial. The math just wasn’t all that big a part of it.
There’s a lot of ways to make a movie suck anyway; you’re right. Making a movie all about spaceship design or overindulging the CGI crew are a couple of them. Making it about characters, well-written characters, helps avoid that, and this book has the potential to be a good film.
Would make a good movie-it was written in 1958, and had the martians living underground. That made sense.
No, because it’s embarrassed.
So puny it can’t even hold an atmosphere or manage a decent magnetic field.
It needs women.