John Carter : A Princess of Mars - Part 3

[Darthphere]

Why would 4 people make it up that KS was hardly in the marketing? Honestly, go back and watch the trailers and see how little Kristen is in them, especially the first few. I have nothing to gain by arguing this point either, but I clearly remember Theron and Hemsworth getting much more trailer and poster limelight than Stewart.

Theron was the main focus of the marketing campaign, mostly because she's essentially the main character. There is no way Hemsworth got more spotlight than Stewart in the marketing, I mean, she's the title character.

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OMG! She even has lines in the second one!

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Yup she's barely in all of these. I'd love to see you argue that she was hardly in any of these trailers or moreso than Hemsworth. There are more TV spots I can post if you want to continue with that line of thought.

 

[DarkSovereignty]

Were some of my posts deleted from this thread?

I'm thinking that was a mods way of saying "stop talking about snow white in the john carter thread."

 

[Darthphere]

Nah, that can't be it.

 

[C. Lee]

I'm thinking that was a mods way of saying "stop talking about snow white in the john carter thread."

The bolded part tells all.....

 

[Darthphere]

C. Lee, thinking is outlawed here.

 

[C. Lee]

C. Lee, thinking is outlawed here.

That's what I thought...I may have to infract him for that...it confuses too many of our posters.

 

[I Am The Knight]

Which is why they should have marketed John Carter as a predecessor to Star Wars and most sci-fi/fantasy movies that came later. They didn't and that's why they failed because they thought people would just show up to see someone fight aliens with a sword. The marketing gave it a been there, done that feel to the movie. They just dropped the ball completely in that department.

Because the whole thing was kinda been there, done that. Again, they didn't show a terribly diffrent movie. And if they had, that would've been...False advertisement They had to work with what they had, and what they had was crap

Why would people care that it inspired Star Wars? They have Star Wars. Sell them something that looks interesting and fresh if at all possible.

Also, it looks bland because....well because it is. Mars isn't really known for it's great scenery but there are some gorgeous looking set pieces in this movie.

So? They had the budget to spice up the scenery. They are not making a documentary. They can go kinda crazy if they want to, and maybe should've.

There are some cool scenes in the movie, yeah, but again, nothing memorable.

 

[Darthphere]

Because the whole thing was kinda been there, done that. Again, they didn't show a terribly diffrent movie. And if they had, that would've been...False advertisement They had to work with what they had, and what they had was crap

Why would people care that it inspired Star Wars? They have Star Wars. Sell them something that looks interesting and fresh if at all possible.



So? They had the budget to spice up the scenery. They are not making a documentary. They can go kinda crazy if they want to, and maybe should've.

There are some cool scenes in the movie, yeah, but again, nothing memorable.

I've never read the actual books it was based on, maybe C. Lee can answer this but from what I've read the scenery is pretty much faithful to the source material. Burroughs didn't seem to write a wild version of Mars with jungles and whatnot. It's a desert and that's what we got.

Its funny you bring up the budget because that's another thing people have talked about. This movie went wildly over budget due to reshoots and whatnot so the budget wasn't used in a meaningful manner. It's not like they had to pay big time actors. It's something I'm inclined to agree with you on, the movie doesn't reflect the budget.

 

[DarkSovereignty]

That's what I thought...I may have to infract him for that...it confuses too many of our posters.

I knew thinking would be the end of me...

 

[AVEITWITHJAMON]

Is anyone else of the mindset that John Carter is pretty much the Dune of its day? It has very similar criticisms, even though JC isnt as 'out there' as Dune was. But it is based on a beloved book and yet didnt seem to capture the hearts of movie goers at cinema, however, it seems to be doing quite well in the home market, similar to how Dune did, and that became a cult movie, maybe JC will as well?

Theron was the main focus of the marketing campaign, mostly because she's essentially the main character. There is no way Hemsworth got more spotlight than Stewart in the marketing, I mean, she's the title character.

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[YT]DgfYBJoPFFw[/YT]

OMG! She even has lines in the second one!

[YT]87qLsQ8kDg0[/YT]

[YT]onAVG5oYwpE[/YT]

Yup she's barely in all of these. I'd love to see you argue that she was hardly in any of these trailers or moreso than Hemsworth. There are more TV spots I can post if you want to continue with that line of thought.

I'm sorry but I still think Hemsworth was in those trailers more, especially the first two released, the first of which as you pointed out Stewart didnt even have any lines. In the 2nd trailer they probably had about the same, so I would still say Hemsworth got more focus, just not as much as I originally though.

BUT, YOUR original point was that the movie was marketed towards the Twilight crowd, how can you argue that when in the trailers Theron got by far the most focus and yet the supposed love triangle in the movie and one of Twilights stars didnt get much focus?

 

[Alpha Born]

If there is ever a sequel (which most likely won't happen ) I want them to introduce the First Born (Black Martians) into the movie.

But they need to get rid of the concept of them being pirates who ransack cities and steal the white martian women.

 

[Alpha Born]

I wish they had've made Mars more red in this movie.

 

[Donnie Darko]

Still haven't seen the movie, but recently read A Princess of Mars and have been reading Gods of Mars. How close to the first book is the movie. Sorry, haven't been reading the thread to avoid spoilers before, so just curious.

 

[Whiskey Tango]

Director Andrew Stanton looks back on 'John Carter's' rocky path

When his movie "John Carter" thudded into theaters in March, director Andrew Stanton escaped to New York and spent the next three weeks riding the subway, noodling on scripts and visiting with his daughter and some friends.

For the first time since he started at Pixar Animation Studios in 1990 at age 24, Stanton was facing an unfamiliar sensation — the gut punch of a public failure in an industry that hardly shelters it. The film had forced Walt Disney Studios to take a $200-million write-down and helped lead to the departure of two top executives.

Now, as he processes the experience, he's still a bit bewildered by his movie's "Ishtar"-like reception. He concedes he was taken aback by the creative and cultural leap between animation and live action. And rather than blame the studio, he says he's actually surprised by how much freedom he was granted.

"I was left alone from Day One to the last day," he said in an interview last week, his first since the film's troubled release.

His experience illustrates, among other things, the risks of making movies that are too big to fail, and how the fallout travels in many directions.

With "John Carter," he had hoped to bring his Pixar success to a live-action film. But between its development and its release the leadership at Walt Disney Studios changed, and new top man Rich Ross installed a new marketing chief and head of production. (Ross and his marketing chief, MT Carney, both left in the months surrounding the film's release). By Hollywood conventional wisdom, a regime change would lead to shuttered projects and creative disputes.

Stanton was surprised, however, when the opposite happened and he got little push-back at all. "I thought, 'Are we gonna lose the green light?' In the very beginning I assumed it would be like that, cause who's gonna give me the keys to a Ferrari if I've never driven before?," he said. "But studios are not set up like that. They're like, 'Go and drive the car and don't drive it off a bridge.'"

Instead of looking over the shoulder of an animator in an office, Stanton was shooting in sandstorms in the Utah desert and working within the spontaneous, adrenaline-fueled culture of a set full of actors, cameramen and grips. He also learned, while still in the scripting stage, that he had high-functioning attention deficit disorder.

In 2007, when he wrote his first draft, adapting it from a 1917 Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, he and Disney executives hoped the movie would launch a lucrative new sci-fi franchise. On its release critics praised the visuals but knocked the story as messy and overlong. It opened to a lackluster $30 million in the U.S., although it went on to gross $283 million worldwide, not nearly enough to pay off the studio's hefty investment of more than $250 million plus marketing, nor warrant the sequel Stanton had begun outlining.

His wasn't the only big, expensive movie to bomb this year — Universal's "Battleship" and Warner Bros.' "Dark Shadows" both under-performed. But "John Carter" bombed first and loudest, and seemed, even months before its release, to be caught in an irreversible spiral of bad buzz.

At Pixar, Stanton is known as an alpha figure, a counterweight to Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter's big softie approach. He's the guy who steers the conversation and encourages his colleagues to "fail as fast as you can" on a movie — to have enough time to fix mistakes.

Just the second animator to join Pixar after Lasseter, Stanton collected an Oscar apiece for directing "Finding Nemo" and "Wall-E." As vice president of creative at the Emeryville, Calif., studio, he's earned writing or producing credits on eight other features, including hits like "Monsters Inc.," all three "Toy Story" movies and "Up." On Sept. 14, Disney will re-release "Finding Nemo," his biggest hit, in 3-D.

The director was accustomed to Pixar's method of storyboarding a movie and massaging the script multiple times — a luxury afforded by the deliberative way animated films are made, not on sets where massive crews can burn through $500,000 a day. Early on, he said he requested that multiple reshoots be built into the production schedule.

Disney granted that request, but a perceptual difference emerged. In Emeryville, reshoots are synonymous with improvement; in Hollywood, they're synonymous with screw-ups.

The film was beginning to generate scorn. "There was this weird air the summer before of schadenfreude, of doomed to fail," he recalled. "It isn't a nice atmosphere to be in, but what can you do about it?"

"At Pixar, it's safe to fail," said Lasseter. "No one's gonna judge you. We'll keep tweaking that story to the very end." Lasseter, who has a deep affection for Stanton, said he was flummoxed by the ill will the film seemed to engender.

As Stanton embarked on the reshoots, Disney changed the title from "John Carter of Mars" to simply "John Carter," which, like the trailers and posters of bare-chested star Taylor Kitsch striding through the desert, provided little sense of what it was actually about.

"We didn't always agree on which direction to take every step of the way, but there was never serious contention," he said of the studio's marketing. "The truth was everyone tried their very best to crack how to sell what we had, but the answer proved elusive."

After his New York trip, Stanton returned to Pixar and resumed his work consulting with directors on their projects, including Lee Unkrich, his co-director on "Finding Nemo," who said his friend was wounded by the defeat.

"Andrew poured every little bit of his heart and soul into 'John Carter', sweating the tiniest detail," Unkrich said. "'John Carter' was the first time he's been in a position where things didn't work out in the way he hoped and of course he had to go through it in a really public way."

Other filmmakers have had to recover from a disaster or disappointment. After "Ishtar" tanked in 1987, it was nine years before director Elaine May took another screenwriter credit. After his 1989 passion project, "The Abyss," saw only middling box office returns, James Cameron said he did some soul searching. "It lost its opening weekend to 'Uncle Buck,'" Cameron said. "To me, that's a failure. You start to rationalize, what did we do wrong? "

After "The Abyss," Cameron returned to the film that had launched him, "The Terminator," and made "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." Similarly, Stanton's next directing project will be a sequel to "Finding Nemo."

"What was immediately on the list was writing a second 'Carter' movie," he said. When that went away, everything slid up. I know I'll be accused by more sarcastic people that it's a reaction to 'Carter' not doing well, but only in its timing, but not in its conceit."

Stanton said he's proud of his film and hopes, optimistically, that it joins the ranks of movies such as "Blade Runner" and "The Wizard of Oz," which took years to find their audiences.

He said he has learned one important lesson from the whole experience.

"The ennui you have after a huge success when it's all over is exactly the same as the ennui you have when it's a bomb," he said. "You loved the doing. You've spent every waking moment thinking about its birth, worrying about it, raising it. It's an empty nest syndrome. Whether your kid went to college or went to jail, it's an empty nest."

http://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...tor-20120908,0,1996908.story?page=1&track=rss

 

[matrix_ghost]

Director Andrew Stanton looks back on 'John Carter's' rocky path

http://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...tor-20120908,0,1996908.story?page=1&track=rss

Not trying to be a *****e bag but there is a BIG BIG difference between JC financial failure and James Cameron´s Abyss.
Abyss wasn´t a failure rather an underperformer. Not to mention that it was a groundbreaking movie in terms of the CG tech.

 

[Project862006]

anyone feel one of the biggest mistakes was not making mars breathtaking and visually stunning

audiences want to be transporting to a new world look at avatar's pandora

jc on earth and jc on mars visually looked the same

mars should of been grand and beautiful looking not a bland Arizona desert with aliens

 

[terry78]

Well, Mars actually does look like that from what we've seen via the rover, so I get why Stanton chose that. But this should have been more of a fantastical early 1900's version of Mars like the Frazetta drawings.

 

[matrix_ghost]

Also going back to the interview. Cameron went back and made Terminator 2. Stanton is going back to Finding Nemo 2. A live action movie vs a animated movie ?
Again big difference. And , aside from Cars , i'd say that Pixar's greatest strenght lies in their storylines and character performance.
Stanton probably didn't have any choice BUT to go back to animation movies . UNless he made a indie movie , no studio would risk hiring him again for a live action blockbuster. Especially now money talks and JC failure is felt thru out Hollywood.

 

[Warhammer]

Stanton should bite the bullet and do one or two small movies. Rebuild his reputation and show that he can do an action film with a smaller budget. Just go out there and wow people with something unexpected. John Carter failed, but it doesn't necessarily have to kill his live-action career unless he himself decides not to move forward.

 

[DyeLorean]

The biggest problem for him was obviously the transition from animation to live action. The project was just too big for him to handle.

 

[AVEITWITHJAMON]

The funny thing is though JC wasnt even a bad movie, I have seen much even this year. Stanton should take heart from that fact, not all financial failures are bad movies and JC certainly wasnt one.

 

[Kane52630]

Yeah, even with all the sh** that was happening behind the scenes, he did make a great film.

 

[Gold Samurai]

Also going back to the interview. Cameron went back and made Terminator 2. Stanton is going back to Finding Nemo 2. A live action movie vs a animated movie ?
Again big difference. And , aside from Cars , i'd say that Pixar's greatest strenght lies in their storylines and character performance.
Stanton probably didn't have any choice BUT to go back to animation movies . UNless he made a indie movie , no studio would risk hiring him again for a live action blockbuster. Especially now money talks and JC failure is felt thru out Hollywood.

Right. He's literally crawling back after a massive defeat.

 

[matrix_ghost]

Stanton should bite the bullet and do one or two small movies. Rebuild his reputation and show that he can do an action film with a smaller budget. Just go out there and wow people with something unexpected. John Carter failed, but it doesn't necessarily have to kill his live-action career unless he himself decides not to move forward.

Yup. JC should be a wake call for him. Making animated movies is very different hen making live action movies.

The biggest problem for him was obviously the transition from animation to live action. The project was just too big for him to handle.

I think his approach to the project was problematic. Not the project itself.
Andrew Andamson , who directed the first Narnia movie, had previously started out in animation. He was the director of Shrek 1 and 2.
Not to mention that the first Narnia movie had a huge budget ( 180 million).

The funny thing is though JC wasnt even a bad movie, I have seen much even this year. Stanton should take heart from that fact, not all financial failures are bad movies and JC certainly wasnt one.

Oh i agree with that. It's nowhere near as bad but i can see why it didn't excite people.

 

[dark_b]

reading this last article i feel sorry for Andrew. it looks like he learned nothing from this live action experience. does he expect that every movie studio should be like Pixar?