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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.

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