Don’t forget Devil Girl from Mars.
Yeah, I mean in the past twelve years there have been a lot of popular pirate movies. I mean there’s PotC 1-4, and um, that porn pirate movie. And… Wait, PotC was just a fluke, it didn’t really do much to popularize the theme after all. I can picture a hit movie or a even a hit series about Mars, really, but not as the beginning of a turn around in the general thrust of how Mars movies turn out.
Except for the Schwarzenegger Totall Recall you mean? The one that opened #1 at the box office and made $261 Million?
Yeah – s why, when they remade it, did they change the setting from Mars to Earth, huh?
Actually, I liked the original Total REcall a lot, even if it did steal shamelessly from Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization (not set on Mars) and swiped the ending from Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars (which was).
I’m going to have to STRONGLY disagree with you on that.* John Carter* was absolutely atrocious. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. I was shocked by just how unwatchable it was. Disney buried it because they knew any amount spent too promote it was going right down the drain. Between it and the irredeemably-bad Mars Needs Moms, the red planet (with help from The Lone Ranger) would have bankrupted Disney if not for the Marvel movies.
Nah, I’m with Cal on this. It wasn’t Best Picture material or anything, but it was a fun couple of hours in the theater, and it improved on the original source material (which was also fun) in a number of ways.
I kinda liked John Carter myself. Woola as the guard “dog” at the creche? Nestlings stay in the nursery. Oh, it’s a game ! Jump again!
That’s because they terraformed it using traditional college vegetation: Ivy, trees, hemp. That’s why it’s now habitable, unlike Utah.
I think the lesson is more that comedy and horror movies about Mars don’t sell.
John Carter? I think that fell to Tent Pole Excess. Idiot cokehead studio execs cough up > $200 million on a new franchise NOT based on a current pop best selling book?
X-Men, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Hunger Games; you can throw $200 million at them and be fairly certain you’re getting your money back. If they would have thrown $200 million at Percy Jackson, they’d have lost money. As it was, they spent $95 million to make $245 million, which is why it had sequels.
$200 million into a serial from the early 20th century? Madness.
What, you’ve never seen Doctor Who?
You’re saying London looks like a sand and gravel pit?
Guess it’s gone downhill since I visited.
Gonna have to disagree with you strongly on this one. I loved the film, and so did lots of other people.
As for why it got buried, it wasn’t because of the film’s quality – it was a pawn in a dynastic struggle at Disney. But don’t take my word for it. The case has been made at length in John Sellers’ book John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood:
You can also read about it here: John Carter: The Flop that wasn’t a Turkey
Fans even went out and made their own trailer, because the official one released by the studio was so bad:
All true. Also some critics panned it for being “derivative” then when their error was pointed out, they got all mad and sulky. So it had poor critical response due to ignorant critics.
John Carter was an abomination because all movies based on books should reflect my own interpretation of the story.
Look, John Carter was terrible. Not unwatchable terrible. But still pretty bad. And that’s fine, except it was the 4th most expensive movie in history. If you are going to throw a quarter of a billion dollars at a film, you better come up with freakin’ Avatar or Dark Knight Rises.
I think the implication is 90% of Doctor Who episodes that take place “off world” are filmed in a quarry somewhere outside of Cardiff. At least the old episodes. A lot more of it is CGI now.
Actually, John Carter has a 51% rating on Rotten Tomatos (a blunt instrument for gauging response, but there it is). It got a good review from Roger Ebert, among others. Much better than “still pretty bad”.
As for cost, it was $200million by bsome sources, and $225 according to Disney. The Wikipedia page gives, by some alchemy, $265, claiming to include some of the cosdt of promotion – which ought not to be folded into the cost of production. That page lists LOTS more films – about 25 – that cost $200 or over
And if you compensate for inflation, even using its trumped-up figures, it’s still only the 8th most expensive.
Me, I love it, and have watched it numerous times. And I’m sorry we’ll never see Gods of Mars.
We’ve seen all this crap done a hundred times before, and done better. The response that they were all ripping from Carter doesn’t make it any less dull on screen. It was far too late in the game to approach adaptating the original with such unyielding straightforwardness. Play with it, play with expectations, out-do the imitators, wink to audience, lampshade something? No, they just shot it straight.
Well, no, they didn’t. John Carter isn’t unalloyed Burroughs presented page-for-page from the book. They put an intro (on Mars), added on a framing story and added stuff established who John Carter was before he ever got to Mars, so that you know who he is and how he handles situations first. They depicted the iconic scenes at the start, but changed the plotaround. They beefed up Dejah’s role and made her formidable. And in the process they depicted things that aren’t clichés, and haven’t been seen elsewhere.
No, I don’t buy it – JC* doesn’t look even like the other nostalgia out there. It ain’t got space ships. It doesn’t even have ray guns (aside from that one Thern weapon – which didn’t show up in Burrough’ series until, IIRC, A Fighting Man of Mars (1930), after Buck Rogers used his first hand-held ray gun) – the Tharks use swords and rifles! It’s seriously different from Flash Gordon (which was itself a ripoff of John Carter, and used swords almost as much as ray guns) and all those other Planetary Romances, and light years from Star Wars.
*As my high school English teacher insisted – talking about The Red Badge of Courage – “Just because a character’s initials are JC doesn’t make him a Christ figure.”
I never thought it about Jiminy Cricket, anyway.
Well, I saw JCoM at an industry screening, surrounded by a friendly audience and well before the critics got their paws on it. And while the audience gave a respectable response, it wasn’t a raise-the-roof one you’d expect surrounded by people close to those who made it.
I thought it was a dud. Badly written and acted, visually uninteresting, and boring. I knew of the source material, of course, though was hardly fluent with it. But I went in with the simple hope of being entertained, and I wasn’t.
There is a way to handle well-worn material without it feeling overly familiar, but this film simply failed at that. I wasn’t convinced at this real world or culture, I didn’t care about the conflict, and JC was completely inert as a character. Everything reminded me of something I’d seen before, but without a hint of interesting novelty. That there might have been small little details which were new made no difference, because the vibe, pacing, arc and emotional values were so rote and unengaging.
Was it the worst film I saw that year? Probably not. But I left with an overwhelming sense of indifference–so much so that even now when it pops up on free cable (TNT, FX, etc.), I’m not even remotely curious to revisit it. Zzzzzzzzzzz.
*Doctor Who *is known for shooting in Cardiff, Cardiff-as-London, and in the old days, the infamous “BBC quarry.”
I leave which one Slow Moving Vehicle was referencing as an exercise for the reader.