John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

A book about the debacle that was the promotion campaign, or lack thereof, for this movie.

John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

Use the "Look Inside" feature to read a bit, it's interesting.

I had no idea anyone had written a book about this until Doug Drexler mentioned it on Facebook.

The marketing campaign for this movie was a complete failure by Disney. I've read many science fiction novels in my lifetime but I had no clue what "John Carter" was referring to when I first started reading about the film before it came out in theaters. Only after I did some research online did I find out this was a novel written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and published in 1917!


So in addition to the bad marketing, we are also talking about an original science fiction film (ie not a sequel and not a reboot) and thus the odds were greatly stacked against it from the very beginning. I was not surprised at all when this film flopped at the box office.


This was a secondary factor behind the flop but it was a mistake to hire a largely unknown actor for the lead role: Taylor Kitsch. Um...who?

The targeted group at the time would have bitten into the actor since he was just coming off the role of Tim Riggins in Friday Night Lights and then followed this role up with the role of Lt. Michael Murphy in "Lone Survivor" with Mark Wahlberg.

I too was not/am not surprised with the flop of the movie. I had no idea that Edgar Rice Burroughs had written a series of early sci-fi books/articles until I saw the movie; about a year after it was in the theaters and decided to see what it was about. I still haven't read the book but I plan on doing so at some point soon.

Since we are on the subject of big budget sci-fi films that ended up being box office disasters, I would suggest reading up on these films each of which have their own drama-filled production horror stories:


Dune

Jupiter Ascending

Cloud Atlas

The Adventures of Pluto Nash

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Battlefield Earth

I think the best of those Panzer was Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets which I watched again only very recently. Cara Delevingne was very pleasing to the eye and I loved the costumes.

She is indeed very attractive but apparently her acting skills are about the same as those of Lindsay Lohan. And yes, the French always come up with very interesting costume designs for scifi movies. Heck, I still remember many of the costumes from the Fifth Element.

I think the movie's issues are generally blown out of proportion, and if you look at the Rotten Tomatoes reviews, the overall score is low, but not terribly so, at 52%. When you dig into the details, you find that over half of the reviewers gave it a largely positive review, and for those that didn't like it, they generally didn't think it was terrible, just not good. I think that lends a lot of support to the fact that marketing is what made it such a financial disaster.

Taylor Kitsch has a bit of a reputation now as being a movie-killer, since some high-profile movies he's been in have flopped. Lynn Collins hasn't been in a lot of movies, but I think she did well here, and like Delevingne, she's easy on the eyes and wore some nice costumes .

I thought the movie was very well done, I saw it in the theatre and have watched it at home a couple of times since.

Having read the books I thought the changes made were improvements, some of the sci-fi ideas of 1917 just don't translate well to today and had to be updated.

Fun flick! I can watch this thing just about anytime I run across it.

I bought the Blu-Ray disc of it, and enjoyed it, but I think expectations might be different when not going into a theater when it's first out. I had heard some negative reviews, so I think I lowered my expectations. Overall, I thought it was a fun story, and had good effects.

Of that list, Panzer, I have only seen Dune, Cloud Atlas and Battlefield Earth. The others I have avoided.

Cloud Atlas was okay, but overrated.

Dune is a classic and fantastic in Lynchian style, but there's a reason there are so many different cuts, including fan cuts of the film--the movie took artistic liberties with Herbert's source material, and tried to be too surreal. But that's what Lynch does, and his films and shows are for the most part, awesome. But Dune needed to be a little less surreal and do a better job telling the story a bit closer to the novels. I think if he had done that, the film would have turned out better.

Battlefield Earth I have only seen once, but... it was bad. I've never been compelled to watch the film again.

I don't know who said it but they were correct. John Carter , the Film , did have the " Flavor " of the stories. I have seen the film in a theater and a couple of times since then. It was a Fun film. However, I do think that they should have went more over the top in improvements. Perhaps mixing more in of the other Mars books.

Dune a great story, but a bad film. I do recommend reading the novels, your imagination will run wild

The single biggest problem with the film is that David Lynch did not have full creative control over the project. It was a 50/50 collaborative effort with the producers. I am thoroughly convinced that the film would have turned out better had Lynch had total creative control.