R.I.P., John Carter. What its failure means and why it matters...

With ten days down and $53 million in the domestic kitty and $179 million worldwide, it's pretty much time to call 'time of death' for John Carter.  Disney is announcing that the picture will lose them $200 million, and it's almost fitting. The film serves as a shining example of everything that can go wrong when crafting a franchise film in big-studio Hollywood.  Not only was it a case where everything went wrong, it was a film where everything absolutely had to go right on a record level in order to have any hope of making its investment back.  To be frank, they should have seen it coming from a mile away.   

The film will likely fail to reach even $85 million at the US box office, and it will likely fail to reach $300 million in foreign grosses, putting its worldwide total at under $400 million.  That's not a terrible outcome for most films and had the budget been kept in check, it would probably break even in the end.  But Disney spent $250 million producing John Carter, making it the most expensive non-sequel ever made.  I've whined a lot about reckless budgets for long shot films, but the rule is simple.  Do not spend Return of the King-level money on Fellowship of the Ring.  All three Lord of the Rings films originally came in at around $95 million apiece.  It was only after Fellowship became a monster hit that New Line gave Peter Jackson and company extra money to play around on the next two films, culminating in a now-quaint $150 million budget for The Return of the King.  It's a simple concept.  Unless your film is a guaranteed home run, don't spend so much that you have to hit a home run in order to break even.

John Carter had absolutely no insurance against its mammoth budget.  It was not a well-known property, not a sequel, had no stars, had a generally unknown filmmaker (can anyone outside of us movie geeks tell you who directed Finding Nemo?) with no live-action film making experience and no apparent editorial safeguards, plus an unsafe release date which limited the chances of strong legs.  The sad/shocking part is not that Disney rolled the dice and hoped for the best.  The inexplicable part is that there is absolutely no plausible reason that Disney (or anyone else) should have expected the film to be the kind of hit it needed to be.  Add to that an anemic and confused marketing campaign which made the movie look far worse than it was (I didn't like the movie, but it was better than the marketing implied) and hid the things that actually might have gotten audiences interested (like a well-developed female lead), and there is no reason that Disney shouldn't have seen this coming a year ago.  Sadly, those like myself who have been waving our arms in the air screaming 'Danger!' are now being ridiculed and/or called doomsayers who hurt the film with our negative publicity.

Thanks to out-of-control budgeting, John Carter *had* to be the next-big-thing in order to not lose a fortune. But it wasn't.  It wasn't new and exciting.  It didn't offer new sights and incredible moments of visual wonderment. It had one well-written supporting heroine and a heroic lead who was surprisingly not-terrible surrounded by muddled and/or dull supporting characters who all looked alike and had unpronounceable names.  It offered lackluster action that paled in comparison to the likes of any number of big-scale fantasy films over the last decade (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Avatar, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, etc), while offering not a hint of political/social relevance or parable.  All of these things wouldn't have been fatal (after all, opening weekend is about marketing, not the film) had the deck not been so stacked against it.  Without all of the other ingredients, and with a lackluster marketing campaign to boot, the film was doomed as soon as the budget climbed over $125 million.  And Disney had no right believing that audiences would ignore all of the above factors and race to the theater on opening night just out of habit.

More than anything else, Disney's production of John Carter was a defining exercise in cynicism.  The film was yet another desperate attempt for the Mouse House to create a new boy-friendly franchise, spitting on their profitable female-driven cartoons while they lost money chasing boys again (Prince of Persia) and again (The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which I liked but damn-well shouldn't have cost $150 million).  It was an insanely budgeted film that may have appeared to be a bold risk, but in fact came off as painfully generic and formulaic fantasy adventure that appeared in the marketing materials to resemble a cross between Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes.  But John Carter represents the ultimate cynical hubris in that Disney expected blockbuster success for no particular reason.  Disney merely expected the media to arbitrarily anoint John Carter as 'the next cool thing' and then expected audiences to flock lime lemmings to a terrible-looking movie that they had no reason to expect they would enjoy.  But audiences didn't flock to a lousy-looking movie that offered no promise of any real entertainment.

That is the one silver lining in this mess.  There are many lessons of John Carter (don't overspend, don't skimp on varied marketing if the property needs to be sold to newbies, don't presume that geek interest equals mainstream interest, don't hire an untested filmmaker and let them run wild, etc) and we can expect the studios not to truly learn any of them.  But the key moral of the story is simply that blockbuster-level audiences won't just line up at the ticket boot for anything Hollywood tells them they should see.  They may not always make the best choices, they may choose safety over risk, but they won't just show up on cue purely because a film is arbitrarily crowned as the next defining blockbuster.  The studios still have to work for your money.  And that's actually a good thing.

Scott Mendelson