In between Harry Knowles declaring every movie put out by a director that glances in his direction the best thing ever, we find some more news about the upcoming John Carter of Mars movie that might actually happen (unlike the aborted attempt Harry Knowles was producing, or the dozens of failed attempts before that)

I edited out a bit of Quint’s ramblings

I was able to attend a luncheon before the panel and sat with Tom McCarthy and Andrew Stanton. Of course John Carter of Mars had to come up. He also elaborated on the panel, but here’s what’s going on with JOHN CARTER OF MARS:

– It is live action.

– “It is huge, it is exciting, it scares the crap out of me. It’s either going to make me or break me.”

– It is NOT a Pixar movie, rather a Disney film. However Stanton’s creative team from Pixar are all still involved.

– The style is going to be very real, not highly stylized. He said that 20 some years ago that version could have been made, but since Star Wars and a whole glut of science fiction and fantasy films have ripped off giant portions of JCOM over the years the only option he sees is doing a straight up, realistic version of the story. He described it as if it was a National Geographic crew that stumbled across a preserved civilization while exploring a cave. Very real, but awe-inspiring.

– He is not planning nor wanting to shoot it 3-D, but thinks Disney might want to push him towards it.

– Stanton has been a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs since he was a kid, so while he won’t have the same kind of development time on this one as he had on his animated movie he looks at it as him living with the story in his brain for 40 plus years instead of the 6-8 of his animated films.

– He has his second draft done and will be casting soon.

– John Carter WILL be a Civil War soldier.

sounds okay so far, but I will be forever wary of this project.

Gee, I guess we should be reporting on this, especially since it looks like this movie might actually get off the ground this time. Maybe. Andrew Stanton mentions they will mix life action and CGI, so who knows how this will turn out. The story changes might be a problem, but then only to people like me. I also doubt everyone will be walking around naked. But he did WALL-E, and that movie was awesome, so maybe there is hope. More info in the link.

‘John Carter Of Mars’ To Be ‘Perfect Definition’ Of Live-Action, CGI Hybrid
Published by Eric Ditzian on Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 12:18 pm.
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“It’s real,” Stanton assured us. “We’re full bore on it right now. We’re over the hump of the writing phase, and we’re certainly far from rewrites.”
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“I don’t want to be dissing it,” he said, “but it almost had an absence of a story for a feature film because it was very episodic. In its day it was a comic book. I mean, this book was written in 1912. It was the comic book you got in the time before there was such thing as comic books. So, it was really just about the next fight, the next adventure, the next romance.”
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Messing with a classic of the fantasy genre is always risky, but Stanton believes the passage of time is on his side. “Fortunately it’s an old enough story,” he said. “There isn’t such huge allegiance to it that people won’t mind that we muck with it a bit to hopefully amplify the essence of what made me interested in it as a young kid and hopefully will keep me interested in it as an adult.”
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