Monday Morning Quarterback Part I
By BOP Staff
March 13, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Kim Hollis: John Carter, which you may have heard was kind of expensive, opened to $30.2 million. What are your thoughts regarding this result?
Bruce Hall: Disney sure picked the right character for a $250 million action movie, didn't they? They sure gave it a catchy title, didn't they? And they sure went out of their way to market it well, didn't they? I suppose the good news is that in addition to the rather soft domestic opening, the film picked up another $70 million overseas. And Taylor Kitsch seems like a nice guy, so there's that. Critical reception to John Carter has actually been better than any of the Transformers movies, but giant fighting robots blowing shit up is a known quantity that people seem to have no problem embracing. Meanwhile, outside of a relative handful of bookworms and science fiction buffs, the general public is by and large completely ignorant of John Carter. So, it would seem appropriate to have put together an imaginative marketing campaign. Who is this guy? What is he doing jumping around like that? Why is he surrounded by strange monsters, crazy looking spaceships and evil guys with British accents? In other words, prospective viewers needed at least a baseline answer to the question: "What the hell is this?"
The ad campaign for John Carter was notoriously confusing and vague, providing viewers absolutely no point of reference and no motivation. Even if your story is hard to describe, you at least need to have a visual or thematic hook that makes the movie look positively unmissable - a la The Matrix, or Independence Day. Sadly, John Carter had none of these things. The bleeding isn't quite as bad as many had predicted but when you figure in the rumored marketing costs, this movie has next to no chance of ending up in the black. When the dust settles, John Carter will be in the conversation for Goat of the Year.
Brett Beach: Random thoughts - Why did Noah Wyle's character from ER get a multi-hundred-million dollar Disney movie made about him? And why is someone named Kitsch starring instead? Is it a prequel, like The Carrie Diaries? Con-fu-sing. I won't second guess the Disney team but it seems transparent that "of Mars" got dropped in the wake of Mars Needs Moms (No John Carter of Mars Needs Moms jokes then?) in an attempt to avoid the "red planet" curse. I see this as Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader time only without the first two films in front of it. A $70 million overseas opening is great and it looks like that is where this is going to have to count on its future grosses. I have heard they already committed to a sequel. Bless them for their faith.
Tim Briody: In and of itself, $30 million's not terrible. It's the negative cost that's going to make this an albatross. You don't spend this kind of money on the first entry in a franchise where probably 10% of the audience was familiar with the source material, and I'm probably being generous there. Yes, it's playing well overseas but Disney was hoping to establish a new franchise with John Carter and it didn't take.
Reagen Sulewski: I'd even argue that $30 million without the gigantic price tag would have been a disappointment, since under the best of circumstances, you're looking at maybe $100 million domestic. Look at Cowboys and Aliens, for instance. What I see here is that the film never recovered from a terrible first trailer. You need to have a clear idea of what your film is about, and John Carter never told people what that was until it was far too late. When you're begging people to come to your movie because it's based on something that people have made other movie from, you're not really arguing from a position of strength.
Also, the title thing has been beaten to death at this point, but stick "of Mars" in there, dummies. You were being too cute by half.
Max Braden: I honestly don't see the difference between John Carter and Immortals ($32 million) and Wrath of the Titans. They all seem to be about which warrior can do the biggest power knee drop. Why watch the video game when you can play it at home for hours? And how exactly did the pitch go? "Is James Cameron attached to this?" "No." "Spielberg?" "No." "Will Smith? Tom Cruise? Hugh Jackman?" "Nope, nope, nope." "Huh. Well then, all we can afford is a quarter billion dollars. Don't disappoint me." Andrew Stanton has a great resume, I get that, but his previous hits were fully animated and appealed to five-year olds. A different project means a different budget.
Edwin Davies: It's hard to see this as anything other than a real disappointment for all involved, especially since it was something of a passion project for Andrew Stanton, who loved the books and really fought to get the film made. As is often the case, the foreign take will alleviate some of the pressure from what looks like a sub-$100 million domestic showing, but it'd still need to earn an addition $400 million from foreign territories to put it in the black. Were this an established property, I could see that happening, but considering that all it has going for it is its spectacle, and precious little of that has been on display in its advertising, I think that Disney is still going to take a hit on this one. Then again, there have been reports that a fairly large chunk of the budget for John Carter was spent on developing new technology that Disney will use for other films, so even though they'll lose money, they'll still probably get benefits from it somewhere down the line.
In the end, Disney were pretty much constantly wrongfooted with John Carter, failing to deliver a trailer that made the film seem anything other than incoherent (though that's actually not too inaccurate a depiction of the film itself. I really enjoyed the film, but I spent a good third of the film completely uncertain what the hell was going on) and their indecisiveness regarding how to sell it, which became especially obvious in the last couple of weeks when they suddenly changed tack to talk about how influential the source material is, probably hurt the film a great deal.
David Mumpower: Disney will obviously trumpet the international receipts but savvy box office evaluators understand that those "earnings" are much less profitable. I had thought that John Carter may wind up being a Waterworld type of draw. With this many free ticket giveaways and the escalated ticket prices, the opening weekend number is worst case scenario in my estimation. This mirrors the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in that capital was spent on facilities that will be difficult to justify using again.
DOOOOOOOOOM!
Kim Hollis: Do you believe John Carter was always doomed to fail?
Bruce Hall: Absolutely. Once a film's budget starts to reach biblical proportions, people begin to talk, and they're usually not nice about what they say. Look at Waterworld, or Titanic - huge vanity projects with budgets so large they can't help but completely overshadow any other aspect of the film's development. And there's good reason for it - these kinds of movies usually cost people their jobs. But there are exceptions. Despite the withering press both films received, Waterworld was actually a moderate financial success. And I seem to remember Titanic doing kind of okay at the box office. But Kevin Costner - at least in 1995 - was a bankable name. James Cameron was and is a stud, and you'd have to go pretty far into the jungle to find someone who's never heard of Titanic, history's most obvious metaphor for hubris.
The problem with John Carter is that not many people have heard of the character, the cast was unfamiliar to most and worst of all, the marketing campaign was a joke. The sharks started circling early and when the public sees a feeding frenzy like that, they tend to stay away in droves. Nothing can kill a product quicker than widespread negativity, or even the perception of it. John Carter had no real stars attached to it. Audiences never made a connection to the story in a way that made them want to see it. And the studio made little effort to change that other than to string a few CGI money shots into an incoherent trailer and assume it would speak for itself. There was nothing to counteract the drumbeat of negativity surrounding the project and as a result, John Carter was doomed from the start.
Brett Beach: If your budget is being discussed and a money shot from the trailer isn't right there in the conversation, trouble lies ahead. Brad Bird dodged the troublesome "leap to live action" gauntlet and emerged victorious. Andrew Stanton has apparently created a very divisive piece of pop art (right at 50% on the RT meter) that thrills some and confounds others. When I saw the trailer on the big screen, my first thought was "This is Wrath of the Titans, wait, oh this is Disney's Avatar, you know, for kids!" Either way, that spelled doom for my entertainment dollar.
Reagen Sulewski: This is definitely one that got away from the studio, and could have easily been a Gigli or a Postman, a cautionary tale that executives told their children at night. There was a pretty strong response to the growing avalanche of mocking with those nerd junkets, but the damage was already done.
Max Braden: I think it was always destined for a price point at the box office, which should have driven how it was produced and marketed. There's nothing about the movie that makes me think it wouldn't sell, since it looks like a lot of those actioners that do okay in theaters and provide steady income in the rental market later. But when you bolt out of the gate thinking you're already a winner, you do set yourself up for failure. Big talk just invites big mock.
Edwin Davies: I don't think that it was doomed to fail, but I do think that the mistakes that led to its failure were made very early on and were never successfully corrected. Changing the title of the film to make it seem like less of a sci-fi film, despite the fact that it is about a man who travels to Mars, might have made some weird sense in the aftermath of Mars Needs Moms, but looked ridiculous all the same and started people talking about the film without actually talking about the film itself. No one ever seemed able to shift the conversation to being about the story or the character, it was always about some other facet of the project. Even in the last two weeks, all anyone has talked about is about how much the film has cost, far more than whether or not the film is good or not. Finally, Disney never figured out how to sell the film and never found the one image that would make people take notice, even though there are a couple of moments in the film that would have been perfect trailer moments.
The whole project seems to me to be a series of errors that snowballed over time, eventually reaching a stage where no one could do anything to avert the end result.
David Mumpower: John Carpenter of Mars has been debated as a potential movie project since the 1980s. I feel that what we have seen this week reinforces the decision made by countless previous execs that it's not worth the risk. Anyone hoping for a Stranger in a Strange Land adaptation in the short term just had their hopes dashed.