9 / 10
Official trailer
John Carter is among the most unfairly maligned films of the past fifteen years and one of the most expensive commercial failures in Disney history. The film was released in March 2012. It grossed approximately two hundred eighty-four million dollars worldwide on a production budget of approximately two hundred sixty-three million dollars before marketing costs. Disney reported a two hundred million dollar write-down on the production. The commercial disaster was considerable and contributed to studio chief Rich Ross’s resignation later that year.
The film is a hell of a lot better than those numbers say. My 9 goes to a film whose wounds came from its first act and its marketing department. The craft was there.
This movie got a raw deal, and it never deserved one. Tharks, airships, a princess who’s also a scientist, Willem Dafoe voicing a four-armed warrior chief: that’s pulp adventure made with real money and real care, and I had a wonderful time on Barsoom. Everybody who wrote it off as a flop was grading Disney’s marketing department. The film itself deserved a fair hearing and never got one.
Andrew Stanton directed. The production was Stanton’s live-action feature debut after his Pixar work on Finding Nemo and WALL-E. Stanton had won two Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature. He had been considered among the most accomplished American filmmakers of his generation before the John Carter production.
The flop dinged his reputation far more than the film deserved. It was a lousy way to treat the man who’d just made WALL-E. Later reappraisal has begun restoring his standing. The film deserved better than it received.
The Source
The film adapts Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1912 novel A Princess of Mars.
Burroughs serialized the novel in All-Story magazine before publishing it in book form. The novel is a foundational work of American pulp science fiction and a hugely influential genre work of the early twentieth century. The Burroughs Barsoom series influenced almost every later science fiction property that depicts heroic adventure on other planets.
Star Wars, Avatar, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Dune, and other major science fiction franchises all trace structural elements back to what Burroughs established a century earlier.
The unfairness of the John Carter reception was partly that audiences received the foundational property as derivative of the works that had derived from it. Star Wars looked like the original. John Carter looked like the imitation. The actual relationship was reversed. Audiences who knew the genre history recognized what was happening. Audiences who didn’t know the genre history experienced the film as the imitation of properties they considered original. The structural injustice of arriving last in cultural sequence despite being first chronologically damaged the production considerably.
The Structural Mistake
The film’s most damaging craft failure is that it starts on Earth. John Carter is a Confederate cavalry veteran in 1860s Arizona at the film’s opening. He’s pursuing gold prospects. Apache warriors and Union forces are pursuing him. He discovers a cave that transports him to Mars. The Earth-set opening runs approximately twenty minutes. The Mars content doesn’t begin until the audience has waited through a Western setup that doesn’t match what the trailers had suggested the film would deliver.
The Burroughs source novel handles this material as backstory. The novel opens with Carter already on Mars. The Earth material appears in retrospective narration that establishes his background without delaying the actual Martian content. The choice to dramatize the Earth material at length was a fundamental structural mistake. The film delays the content audiences came to see in favor of content that doesn’t match the marketing or the source.
The correction would have been to open the film on Mars with Carter already transported.
The Earth material could have appeared as brief flashback sequences or as voiceover narration during the early Mars scenes. The structural change would have delivered the Martian science fiction content audiences were expecting from the opening minutes instead of after twenty minutes of unrelated Western setup. The marketing problem of audience confusion about what kind of film John Carter was would have been considerably reduced.
The Arizona opening loses me for a while. I sit through it waiting for Mars, and twenty minutes is a long wait when Mars is what you came for. I’d have opened on Carter already stranded there and let him tell us about the war later, once we cared about him.
The structural mistake also produces tonal whiplash that the production can’t recover from.
The Western opening establishes one set of audience expectations. The Mars content delivers different expectations. The transition between the two tones is jarring. Audiences who came for Martian adventure had to endure Western adventure before receiving what they’d wanted. Audiences who came for Western adventure had to abandon Western expectations when the Martian content began. Neither audience received what they’d expected from the opening sequences. The production satisfied neither demographic effectively.
For Writers
John Carter shows the critical importance of opening sequences in establishing audience expectations. The film opens on Earth with Western adventure content but primarily delivers Mars content with science fiction adventure. The mismatch between opening and primary content damaged audience reception considerably. The lesson for writers is that opening sequences should establish what the work primarily delivers instead of what the work is technically structured to contain. If your story spends ninety percent of its time on Mars, the opening should establish Mars.
The Earth material can appear as backstory, flashback, or narration. The opening should deliver the primary content. Audiences make judgments about what the work is during the first few minutes of engagement. Mismatched opening sequences produce confusion that the remaining runtime can’t fully resolve. Trust the primary content to do the establishing work. Move secondary content to positions where it can support instead of confuse.
The Marketing Disaster
The John Carter marketing campaign was one of the worst in Disney history. The campaign was structurally incompetent across multiple dimensions. The title was changed from John Carter of Mars to just John Carter. The change removed the genre signal that the original title had communicated. Audiences seeing the truncated title had no way to know what genre the film occupied or what content it would deliver. The title change is one of the more visible examples of marketing decisions that produced commercial damage.
Chopping “of Mars” off the title is the decision that makes me want to throw something. Those two words told you what kind of movie this was, and somebody at Disney decided audiences were better off not knowing. I can’t work out who thought that was a good idea.
The trailers were similarly incompetent. Early trailers emphasized the Western opening over the Martian content. Audiences received marketing that misrepresented what the film primarily delivered. The trailers also failed to convey the visual ambition of the Martian sequences. The Tharks, the Helium and Zodanga cities, the airships, the multi-armed alien creatures, and the wider Barsoom visual world all appeared in the trailers without context that would have helped audiences grasp what they were seeing. The marketing showed footage without explaining the footage. The result was confusion that better marketing would have prevented.
The release timing was equally problematic. The film opened in March 2012 against The Hunger Games. Hunger Games marketing that had been considerably more effective than the John Carter marketing was serving the science fiction adventure demographic. Audiences who would have responded to John Carter were being directed to Hunger Games instead. The release schedule produced direct commercial competition that John Carter couldn’t win given the marketing limitations.
The post-release damage control was also poor. Disney announced the two hundred million dollar write-down before the film had completed its theatrical run. The announcement effectively told audiences that the film had failed. Official confirmation that the film was a commercial disaster suppressed word of mouth that might have produced later attendance. The studio’s own admission of failure became part of the film’s broader reception problem.
The Production
The production budget was approximately two hundred sixty-three million dollars before marketing. The marketing budget pushed total costs to approximately three hundred fifty million dollars or higher according to reports. The production was Disney’s most expensive film at the time of release. The scale was visible in every aspect of the production. The visual effects work, the practical sets, the costuming, the location shooting, and the wider production design all reflected the major financial investment.
Andrew Stanton’s direction handled the scale with confidence the live-action debut shouldn’t have allowed.
Stanton had developed his craft on Pixar productions including A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, and WALL-E. He brought the kind of careful sequence planning that animated production requires to the live-action work. Each major sequence is constructed for maximum dramatic impact within the constraints of the wider narrative. The direction is one of the more competent science fiction adventure direction debuts of the past two decades.
Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon wrote the screenplay.
Chabon is among the most accomplished American novelists of his generation. He’d won the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. His contribution to the John Carter screenplay added literary tone that later science fiction adventures have rarely matched. You can hear a novelist in the dialogue, and it’s a pleasure to listen to. The character development handles the source material with suitable respect. The writers put serious craft consideration into the structural decisions about which Burroughs material to dramatize at length and which to compress.
Daniel Mindel, who had previously worked on Star Trek 2009 and would later work on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, handled the cinematography.
The work is competent within the science fiction adventure visual conventions. The Martian landscapes are rendered with suitable scale. The action sequences are choreographed with clarity that contemporary fast-cutting genre films rarely deliver. The visual approach handles the heavy production resources effectively.
The Cast
Taylor Kitsch played John Carter. The casting was the lead-actor decision that the production’s commercial reception most directly criticized. Kitsch had been working primarily on the television series Friday Night Lights. He hadn’t been a major film star before John Carter. The casting represented Disney’s attempt to identify a new male action lead instead of to deploy an established star. The strategy flopped, and Kitsch soaked up more of the blame than his work called for. The performance itself is competent. Kitsch brings suitable physical commitment and theatrical tone to the role.
The performance doesn’t exceed what the role required but also doesn’t fall short.
Lynn Collins played Dejah Thoris, the princess of Helium. The performance is one of the more interesting elements of the production. Collins brings real theatrical training and adult female tone to the role. Dejah Thoris is a scientist, a princess, a warrior, and the political heir to a major Martian power. The character has real agency across the runtime.
Collins delivers each functional tone with suitable commitment. The performance has been reassessed favorably in later years as audiences have engaged with the production beyond the initial commercial failure.
Willem Dafoe voiced Tars Tarkas, the Thark warrior chieftain. The performance is one of the great motion-capture vocal performances of the past fifteen years. Dafoe brings real commitment to a character rendered entirely through CGI. The voice grounds the alien character in actual personality instead of in generic motion-capture performance.
Samantha Morton voiced Sola, the Thark woman who assists Carter in his early Martian arrival. The supporting alien voice work is uniformly strong.
Dafoe’s Tars Tarkas is my favorite thing in the movie. He’s proud, funny and a little sneaky, and I believe in him completely even though every inch of him came out of a computer. Lynn Collins is the other reason I rate this so high, because her Dejah Thoris has a brain and a sword and uses both.
Mark Strong played Matai Shang, the Thern villain. Ciarán Hinds played Tardos Mors, Dejah Thoris’s father. Dominic West played Sab Than, the Zodangan prince. James Purefoy played Kantos Kan, a Helium officer who becomes Carter’s ally. The supporting human and humanoid cast is considerably stronger than the production’s reception suggested. The performances combine theatrical training with suitable science fiction adventure tone. The cast quality is one of the production’s underappreciated strengths.
The Visual Effects
The visual effects work is serious. The production used a combination of practical sets, location shooting, and CGI to construct the Barsoom world. The Tharks are motion-capture CGI creatures with full physical articulation. The production depicted the Martian cities of Helium and Zodanga through combination of practical sets and digital extension. It constructed the airships through CGI with practical reference elements. The visual approach produces a Martian world that audiences engage with as actual environment instead of as obvious digital fabrication.
The Thark characters in particular benefit from the production’s effects investment. The four-armed green Martians appear throughout the runtime in close interaction with the human characters.
The motion-capture integration produces creatures that occupy physical space in scenes instead of appearing as digital additions. The eye-line work, the spatial physics, and the lighting integration all support the necessary illusion that the Tharks are present in the locations the human actors are working within.
The action sequences benefit similarly from the effects work. The Thark arena combat sequence in the middle of the film is one of the more visually accomplished action sequences in 2010s science fiction cinema. The white ape creatures that Carter must fight are rendered with suitable scale and menace. The choreography integrates Carter’s greater strength on Mars with the wider physical environment in ways that produce coherent visual action instead of confused cutting. The action work is one of the production’s distinctive achievements.
For Writers
The lesson of John Carter is that being first in cultural sequence doesn’t protect against being received as last. The Burroughs source novel was published in 1912 and influenced almost every later space adventure property. Star Wars, Avatar, Flash Gordon, Dune, and other major franchises all trace structural elements back to what Burroughs established. The John Carter film delivered the foundational material to audiences who had been consuming the derivative work for decades. Audiences experienced the foundational material as derivative of the derivative work. The structural injustice is real.
The lesson for writers is that cultural sequence matters for how audiences receive work.
Foundational work that arrives in screen form after derivative work has saturated the culture faces the problem of looking like imitation despite being the original. Audiences who don’t know the genre history can’t recognize what they’re seeing. The injustice is structural instead of craft-driven. Writers can’t fully solve this problem.
Writers can be aware of the problem and consider how to frame their work in ways that signal the historical priority their material carries.
The Reappraisal
In the years since its 2012 release, John Carter has received considerable reappraisal.
Critics who had initially dismissed the film as commercial failure have returned to it with fresh assessment. Audiences who avoided the film during its theatrical run have discovered it through home video, streaming, and cable broadcast. The retrospective reception has been considerably more positive than the initial reception.
The reappraisal has identified specific craft achievements that the initial reception hadn’t adequately recognized. The Michael Chabon screenplay contributions. The Lynn Collins performance.
The Willem Dafoe vocal work. The visual effects achievement. The action choreography. Each element receives more careful attention in the retrospective assessment than the initial reception had provided. The result is a film that’s accumulated cultural standing across the decade since the commercial failure.
The reappraisal has also clarified what went wrong commercially. The marketing failures, the structural opening problems, the title change, the release timing, and the studio’s own damage control all contributed to the disaster in ways that had relatively little to do with the actual quality of the film. The film was considerably better than the reception. The reception was considerably worse than the film deserved. The asymmetry has been increasingly recognized across later years.
The Sequel That Did Not Happen
Andrew Stanton had planned a trilogy adapting Burroughs’s first three Barsoom novels.
The John Carter sequel would have adapted Gods of Mars. The third film would have adapted Warlord of Mars. The commercial failure of the first film prevented the trilogy from being produced. The character and concept arcs that the first film had established were left unresolved. Audiences interested in the wider Barsoom material must pursue the Burroughs novels instead of the planned screen adaptations.
The unproduced sequels would have considerably expanded the world the first film established.
The Therns who appear as villains in the first film are part of a larger religious power structure that the second novel develops. The implications of Carter’s relationship with Dejah Thoris develop in ways that later novels explore. The political dynamics between Helium and other Martian powers receive major development across the trilogy. The screen version that exists is the foundation that the unproduced sequels would have built on.
Those lost sequels cost more than the box office did. The Therns were set up as a bigger threat than one film could handle, and I wanted to see Stanton pay that off. Instead we got one very good movie and a story nobody will ever finish.
Disney hasn’t pursued sequel production despite the property reappraisal.
The rights to the Burroughs Barsoom novels have changed hands multiple times across later years. The likelihood that the John Carter property will receive renewed screen development has decreased instead of increased as time has passed. The 2012 film is likely to remain the canonical screen Barsoom adaptation. The film is therefore both the achievement and the entire delivered product of the wider trilogy that should have followed.
For Writers
Michael Chabon’s involvement in John Carter shows the value of casting accomplished literary novelists in screenplay collaboration roles. Michael Chabon contributed heavy literary tone to the screenplay that later science fiction adventures have rarely matched. The dialogue carries actual literary quality. The character development handles the source material with suitable respect. The structural decisions about which Burroughs material to dramatize were made with serious craft consideration. The lesson for writers and producers is that literary expertise from outside conventional screenplay backgrounds can considerably strengthen genre work.
Productions that draw on accomplished novelists for screenplay collaboration often deliver stronger character and dialogue content than productions working exclusively with conventional screenwriting personnel.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Commercial failure doesn’t necessarily indicate creative failure, and John Carter is the example case. The film was a real commercial disaster. It’s also good work that’s received increasing critical reassessment across the decade since release. The structural opening mistake hurt audience reception. The marketing campaign was incompetent. The release timing was poor. The title change removed the genre signal audiences needed. Each non-craft failure compounded the commercial damage in ways that had little to do with what the actual film delivered.
The lesson for writers is that production decisions outside the writer’s control can determine commercial outcomes in ways that the actual work can’t overcome. Marketing failures destroy films that craft success can’t recover. Distribution failures destroy films that creative excellence can’t save. Writers should be aware that commercial success requires factors beyond the writer’s control even when the writer has delivered serious work. John Carter is the demonstration. The screenplay was strong. The direction was competent. The performances were suitable. The visual effects were considerable. The marketing was incompetent.
The commercial result was the marketing’s outcome instead of the craft’s outcome.
Is John Carter as good as people say?
A 9/10. John Carter is among the most unfairly maligned films of the past fifteen years and a considerably better production than the commercial reception suggested. Andrew Stanton’s live-action debut delivered confident direction across major production scale. The Michael Chabon screenplay contributions added literary tone that science fiction adventure films rarely receive. The Lynn Collins performance as Dejah Thoris has been retroactively recognized as among the stronger female lead performances in 2010s genre cinema.
The Willem Dafoe vocal work for Tars Tarkas is one of the great motion-capture performances of the past fifteen years. The visual effects achievement is heavy. The action choreography is competent.
The film’s primary failure is the structural opening that delays Martian content for twenty minutes of Earth-set Western setup.
The opening should have been on Mars with the Earth material handled as backstory or flashback. The marketing campaign compounded the structural problem with incompetent title changes, misleading trailers, poor release timing, and premature studio damage control. The commercial disaster was the consequence of factors largely external to the actual film quality. Audiences who pursue the film with suitable expectations will discover a considerably better production than the reception had suggested.
It’s a 9 because nearly everything the filmmakers controlled, they got right: the Tharks, Dafoe, Collins, the arena fight and a script with real literary quality. The one thing holding it off a 10 is that Earth-bound first act, and I’d trade those twenty minutes of Arizona for five more on Barsoom in a heartbeat. The rest of the damage came from a marketing campaign that failed a film I’m very fond of.
