John Carter of $200 Million Lost
Whoops! Guess you should have advertised the film, Disney! Or at least kept it as John Carter OF MARS, dammit! Now we have a shameful $200 million lost and a big probability that there will be no sequel. Which is a shame, because John Carter (of Mars, dammit!) didn’t suck. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t trainwreck bad. Don’t take my word for it, take my word for it!
Disney said “John Carter” has brought in about $184 million in ticket sales worldwide so far. But ticket sales are split roughly in half with theater owners. The movie’s production budget is estimated to be about $250 million with about $100 million more spent on marketing.
The only way to make the money back is to make a sequel and spend $400 million to make it! It’s just crazy enough to work…
We lost $200 million, but Transformers 3 made over a $ Billion??? That's it, we're invading Earth!
Maybe there’s a reason why they’ve made hundreds of Tarzan movies and never filmed a single one of Burroughs’ mad space opera novels.
Fun fact: Breck Eisner, son of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, is slated to direct a big budget 3D remake of Flash Gordon. I wonder what’s going through his mind seeing this John Carter debacle.
Visions of the pile of cash that was his budget disappearing into the night. But Flash Gordon should be done as on the cheap and on the cheese as possible.
The movie was enjoyable, it just tried to do too much with unfamiliar characters.
It was like doing a Star Trek movie with the Klingons AND the Romulans where everyone is being manipulated by the rock creatures from the episode with Abe Lincoln and a side plot involving Andorians. Some young hard core fans may flip out with all the baddies in one place, but there aren’t many hard core John Carter fans, so it’s just too much for most people. They should have taken out the therns and just had a straightforward good vs bad movie and brought the therns in for any eventual sequel. Sadly, there will likely not be a sequel now.
I agree that their attempts to streamline the story made it more complicated at times. Granted, the original stories had a lot of confusing things happening, but you could have probably combined a few more parts. But the main thing still was the awful marketing and the ridiculous budget.