New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

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.

Continued:       1       2       3