Looking at the John Carter Movie

An excellent video by a channel called Memovision crossed my feed the other day, and he did a great examination of the John Carter movie, made by Disney in 2012, and part of the reason why you aren't seeing these great pulp, public-domain stories made into movies.

Ostensibly Memovision's video is about the flop of the movie, but he did some digging and found out some stuff that must have been hard to find.

Specifically, he managed to find not just the overall budget and box office numbers for John Carter, but also its marketing budget and the cut that the theaters got! He calculates that John Carter lost Disney $180 million.

Nowadays, marketing budgets and theater cuts are next to impossible to find, if you can find them at all!

He has some spot-on analysis of why the movie flopped, too. For instance:

Why name it John Carter? Why not use the Mars name? Probably naming it after the books would have drawn more people in.

Why subvert the character of John Carter? In the books he was noble, idealistic, and heroic. In the movie, he is portrayed as degenerate and desperate.

The setting in the books is imaginative and has a lot of world-building. The movie somehow makes Mars bland.

Disney didn't do anything to get the audience invested in the world or its people, either.

Memovision also talks about several of the influences the Barsoom saga had on pop culture: he talks about similarities in Star Wars, DC Comics (esp. Superman and Martian Manhunter), and Dune!

One other great element of Memovision's video is that he found two great quotes from Ray Bradbury about Edgar Rice Burroughs:

"I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly--Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world."

-and-

"By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special."

So,  yeah, go check out Memovision's video (link up top) and come back to mine if you want.

I talk a bit about some of the other aspects of Memovision's video, like thinking about the difficulty of adapting A Princess of Mars to a PG or PG-13 movie, and the excellent point he makes about the difficulty of updating a work to meet changing cultural norms, while not butchering the work itself.