If you tour around the usual suspects of movie blogs, searching for news relating to the upcoming release of Walt Disney’s John Carter you’re likely to find more stories related to the size of its budget than its actual quality. The negativity surrounding the film began back in August 2011 when Disney was trying to figure out what to do about the massive budget for Gore Verbinski‘s The Lone Ranger, but it has really gained steam in the last two weeks when Deadline.com’s Nikki Finke posted an article headlined “John Carter Tracking Shockingly Soft: ‘Could Be Biggest Write-off Of All Time’“. The quote in the headline is attributed to “a senior exec at a rival studio” discussing the film’s tracking with Finke in an email saying, “It just came out. Women of all ages have flat out rejected the film. The tracking for John Carter is shocking for a film that cost over $250 million. This could be the biggest write-off of all time.” Knowing Finke is hard up to bash anything whenever possible, the quote isn’t a surprise since its scared little chicken of a source knew they wouldn’t be attributed and is just taking advantage of a bullhorn without a conscience. Finke’s journalistic ethics aside, the budget and soft-tracking quickly became the source of blog posts everywhere with Chris Lee at The Daily Beast pouncing with an article headlined “John Carter: Disney’s Quarter-Billion-Dollar Movie Fiasco“. Before we continue any further, it’s at this point I would like to remind you the film hasn’t hit theaters yet and won’t for two weeks, on March 9. However, we’re learning via just these few small snippets that “women of all ages have flat out rejected” it and that it’s a “fiasco”. Let’s see what else we can learn about a movie that isn’t even in theaters yet… Lee breaks down the film’s Super Bowl trailer, quotes a studio exec of his own and gives us this:
If Hollywood executives don’t know who John Carter is, they certainly know what John Carter is. It’s the kind of cautionary tale that keeps studio chiefs popping Ambien at night: a vanity project with sky-high expectations and a humongous budget* that now seems destined to land with a massive thud at the box office–unless it can somehow rake in more than $400 million to break even. In other words, it’s the kind of movie that causes heads to roll.
The cost controversy aside, “Waterworld” is a decent futuristic action picture with some great sets, some intriguing ideas, and a few images that will stay with me. It could have been more, it could have been better, and it could have made me care about the characters. It’s one of those marginal pictures you’re not unhappy to have seen, but can’t quite recommend.
Waterworld ended up making $264,218,220 worldwide in 1995, which translates to $392,955,253 in today’s dollars. Add in home video, television rights, theme park attractions and so forth and while Waterworld may have had a huge budget for its time I hardly doubt Universal is crying over it. The bigger point is, how would it have fared had the pre-release story been about the movie and not the budget? John Carter is a story that has had the likes of Robert Rodriguez, Jon Favreau, Guillermo Del Toro and, it was revealed only recently, even John McTiernan and Tom Cruise interested in bringing it to the big screen. Clearly there is interest in seeing the story told and yet the story is the last thing people seem to be discussing. Is it possible Disney could have bungled the release to the point no one will care? I haven’t read any negative reactions to the film yet and I will be seeing it this Wednesday and will finally be able to judge for myself. What do you think of what you’ve seen so far. Are you concerned? Have the trailers turned you off? What do you expect from John Carter?
