Disney Pictures. Courtesy of Alamy.
An insane budget, one of the weaked major studio marketing campaigns ever, and early soft reviews combined to turn filmmaker Andrew Stanton’s live-action “John Carter of Mars” movie adaptation into one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time.
Grossing $284 million globally from a $263 million production budget, any chance of a franchise died with it. But over a decade on, general opinion on the film has been much kinder as appreciation of its old school adventure tone has been more embraced.
Stanton, who returns to cinemas this Summer with Pixar’s “Toy Story 5,” was recently asked about the following the film has developed in the fourteen years since its release. When questioned by THR about its reevaluation, he reportedly seemed surprised and said “Has it?”.
The interviewer discussed how talk about the film, in a positive way, continues online to this day and Stanton shared a story about fans of the work he had encountered before talking about how the film’s found a new audience:
“This always happens at least once on every set. We’ll be about to roll, and a grip will whisper to me, ‘John Carter.’ And I always say to them, ‘You don’t have to whisper anymore’
I firmly believe there was always that audience. We just didn’t understand that, and we didn’t cater to them [in whatever way]; it got overlooked. But it’s nice to know there was an audience for it, and that it’s founded.
The nice thing about finishing a piece of creative work – whether it’s a book or an album or a movie – is that it’s there for people to find for the rest of time. Unless it’s banned, it can’t be stopped.”
Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Mark Strong, Ciarán Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy and Willem Dafoe starred in the original which opened in cinemas on March 9th 2012.