By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
In the long, storied history of Disney, the company has had massive successes, including the history-making Marvel Cinematic Universe and their entire animated output in the ’90s. At the same time, they’ve created some of the biggest bombs of all time.
The 2012 sci-fi adventure John Carter was, at the time of its release, the least profitable film ever made, a title it might end up losing to Joker: Folie a Deux by the end of the year. A rollicking sci-fi adventure based on classic pulp novels, John Carter should have been a massive success, but it never had a chance, thanks to the worst marketing campaign of all time.
How John Carter’s Trailers Killed The Movie
The first trailer for John Carter explained almost nothing about the plot of the film and had scenes set on Earth intercut with shots of Barsoom (or Mars, as we know it) that looked like they were from two totally separate movies.
The second trailer course-corrected and starts off with Carter fighting in an arena before launching into a montage of the alien planet with Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” playing. As with everything about this movie, it was too far ahead of the curve, as today, every trailer has a slowed-down, epic version of a classic rock song playing over the trailer, but in 2012, this confused most of the general audience.
Worse, there’s nothing about being based on the legendary pulp novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, nothing about being an adventure 100 years in the making, no mention of how it’s starring Taylor Kitsch, who at the time Hollywood was pushing as the next big thing. In interviews leading up to its release, Kitsch publicly spoke about his disappointment with the film’s marketing, which lacked any sort of “hook” or jaw-dropping special effects shot to leave an impression on viewers. Even his other sci-fi dud, Battleship, included a screen-filling shot of the alien ship in all of its glory to tease moviegoers of the battle yet to come.
Disney Even Got The Name Wrong
John Carter had no million-dollar shot in either trailer, which is ironic since it cost $260 million in 2012 (over $357 million, or more than The Marvels). Beyond poor reception to the trailers, the worst decision was made months earlier when the title was changed from John Carter of Mars, a reference to the book its adapting, Princess of Mars, to simply John Carter. No one knew who “John Carter” was, except for ER fans, and the name, by itself, tells you nothing about what the movie is about.
That might sound like a strange problem, and you’d think that surely, people would look it up to see what it was about; after all, the internet was around in 2012, but this problem isn’t unique to John Carter. That’s also one of the things that hurt the original John Wick. The first John Wick teaser was filled with sad Keanu Reeves, and going by the name, no one knew it was an intense action thriller, and a lot of the casual audience assumed it was the latest romantic drama. It wasn’t until after the film was in theaters for two weeks that word of mouth spread, and the film became a massive hit.
Making the name even worse was the marketing campaign, “Are You The Real John Carter?” Disney’s marketing team held a contest asking for people named John Carter to enter a contest to attend a special screening of the film. What it actually did was make people think that John Carter must be some type of mystery movie, similar to the marketing later on for Blake Lively’s A Simple Favor, which asked, “Where’s Emily?” and effectively created a buzz around the movie’s central mystery.
John Carter is a sci-fi adventure film, not a mystery, but again, the marketing muddled the waters and left it unclear exactly what type of movie it was. The marketing campaign, by the way, cost over $100 million and did nothing but damage the film.
John Carter’s Failure Ruined Science Fiction Films, And It’s Still Happening
At the time of its release, John Carter was another in a line of sci-fi flops, from Disney’s own Mars Needs Moms to Cowboys and Aliens just a year earlier, and its historic collapse changed the trajectory of sci-fi films in Hollywood. John Carter is a rollicking adventure film, but in the years that followed, we started getting darker, more gritty sci-fi, as again, studios became more risk-averse and didn’t want to take a gamble on a potential new franchise. Unless it was based on a comic book (Guardians of the Galaxy) or a novel (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets), there are no sci-fi adventure films that entered production after Disney’s failure.
The era of throwing massive budgets at experimental scripts is over, and that still holds today. The only genre trying to push the envelope is horror, thanks to low-budget breakout hits like M3GAN and Terrifier. Major studios are relying on strip-mining old IP or developing legacy sequels, which is why Disney’s been remaking its old animated movies: it’s a sure thing.
John Carter Is A Fun Movie
What makes the film’s lasting legacy, one of dooming us to a world of scared studios unwilling to try something new and different, more depressing is that John Carter is a good movie. Taylor Kitsch never became a major household name, but he does a great job as a Civil War veteran stranded on an alien planet. It’s a shame he never got a chance to build this into a franchise.
The works of Edgar Rice Burroughs had a huge influence on science fiction, with the DNA of Princess of Mars evident in massive franchises like Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy. Proof that despite John Carter’s failure, the film was ahead of its time.
John Carter is currently streaming on Disney+. Give it a chance.
