Occasionally some genuine enthusiasm slipped through Ross’s corporate-speak, including for Sean Bailey’s visually spectacular December 3-D sequel Tron: Legacy and for Prom, a coming-of-age high school story told in a John Hughes/Cameron Crowe vein that Ross called an authentic, honest look at teen life. He was also clearly impressed not only with the revenue stream from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, but with its filmmaker’s stop-motion black-and-white coming-of-age horror flick Frankenweenie, arriving in 2012. (The movie played better for the Academy and critics than it did for audiences.) Ross was upbeat as well about Jason Segel’s upcoming live-action Muppet movie, which would prove a modest success.
Disney’s 2011 slate was mainly composed of films from known labels and franchises that Ross had inherited from his predecessor. Ross had also inherited John Carter, which was projected for a 2012 release. The neophyte executive was in a tricky position, trying to put the best possible face on a project that had millions spent against it and Disney animation/Pixar powerhouse John Lasseter protecting his star director’s flank.
Despite Andrew Stanton’s crucial participation in such Pixar animated blockbusters as Wall-E and Finding Nemo, which combined had made $1.3 billion worldwide, giving the writer-director-animator a live-action movie like John Carter to supervise was a huge gamble. Pixar, a brilliant, slow-moving collective overseen by benevolent dictator Lasseter, who is considered by Hollywood to be the contemporary Walt Disney, was at the top of the animation heap with an enviable and unprecedented run of eleven blockbusters (Toy Story 3 and Brave would become twelve and thirteen). The reason Pixar could deliver such consistent winners was threefold: they had top in-house animators who could always return to the drawing board, Lasseter could replace directors at will, and Pixar could rewrite and redo sections of a movie until they fired on all cylinders. Stanton was a vital part of a team that relied on rewrites, rough animation assemblages (animatics), and the constant changing of storylines until each film played perfectly.
Live action is altogether a different sort of beast. It relies on a single captain to make creative decisions, approving scripts, casting, designs, and visual effects—hopefully backed by experience, in the form of problem-solving producers. The director sits at the helm of a sprawling and expensive enterprise. Marshaling all these resources on location with sets, props, camera equipment, teamsters, actors, and extras—not to mention the ongoing painstaking visual effects pipeline—can cost millions of dollars per day. As soon as a movie gets a green light, the clock is ticking.
And John Carter was huge. The budget was $250 million, because Burroughs’s exotic Mars landscape was crammed not only with palaces, warriors, weapons, and spacecraft, but with exotic alien creatures that needed to be designed. Not since Star Wars or Avatar had such a rich world been created from scratch.
It was always going to be a challenge to pull audiences into Burroughs’s Martian fantasy world on the red planet Barsoom. Many readers of a certain age loved escaping into this exotic universe of warriors, princesses, and six-limbed Tharks, including Lucas and Cameron, who had already mined that territory themselves, bringing to the screen a new level of live action mixed with digital environments and multiple performance-capture characters.
As crucial as Stanton had been at Pixar, he had not established himself as a quality brand like Spielberg who pulls audiences into movie theaters. And X-Men Origins: Wolverine costars Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins, along with Rome costars Ciarán Hinds and James Purefoy, were hardly marquee names able to put butts in seats like Johnny Depp or Angelina Jolie.
Inexperienced Disney chief Ross was supervising a behemoth that was well under way, with millions already spent. And at the same time, under Iger’s directives, he let go of many of Disney’s experienced production, distribution, and marketing professionals. He had hired young producer Sean Bailey (Tron: Legacy, Gone Baby Gone, The Core) to run motion picture production, and advertising outsider M. T. Carney to run studio marketing. When the studio tested the movie’s “materials” months before release—characters, title, designs—they did not play well with audiences. Burroughs’s Martian novels are not as well known as his Tarzan series, which have fueled countless film and TV iterations over the decades. No one knew these books or characters beyond hardcore fans like Stanton who had grown up with comics based on the series. Younger generations were no longer familiar with the titles. Disney would have to reintroduce them, and build excitement about a new exotic world, Barsoom, as Cameron did for Pandora.
Ross was relying on a new marketing team run by Carney, who chose not to place the movie inside the proper obvious genre context, the male sci-fi fantasy universe, but instead, with so much investment on the line, took the mass-audience appeal-to-everyone approach. Disastrously, the marketers got rid of the most commercial element of the project by trimming the title John Carter of Mars—in order to avoid any association with the Bob Zemeckis–produced flop Mars Loves Moms—to John Carter. And fearful of the period dud Cowboys & Aliens, Disney stayed away from the film’s western elements as well.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of outgoing studio chief Cook, he was an ace marketer who would never have so mishandled this campaign. John Carter was now generic: its stand-alone JC logo meant nothing, and even conjured up squirmy religious connotations. Disney then made another crucial error, opting not to promote the movie in advance to its prime demographic at the July 2011 Comic-Con, San Diego’s gargantuan convention for sci-fi/fantasy and comic-book fans. Instead, Disney chose to give fans a first look at John Carter at their own family-friendly D23 Expo in August in Anaheim, where Stanton’s show-and-tell on the movie bombed. It just didn’t belong.
Clearly, Disney marketing didn’t know how to brand John Carter and build fans for an elaborate new universe. While Stanton stayed true to Burroughs’s century-old Princess of Mars novel, the fantasy adventure no longer carried mass recognition or appeal for contemporary audiences, and Disney failed to find a way to connect with them.
By the time John Carter finally opened on March 9, 2012, after three years in production, industry insiders and pundits had already called out the epic as a misfire. No studio picture had trumpeted “disaster” so loudly since Sony’s misbegotten remake of Godzilla (1998) or Warner Bros.’s box-office bombs Poseidon (2006) and Green Lantern (2011). Stanton’s deep passion for the material and reliance on thousands of VFX shots didn’t preclude the movie from requiring eighteen days of reshoots. That telegraphed a problem film. And for a $250 million movie to open at $30 million for its first three days—with full-bore studio marketing salvos behind it—was shocking. And as a New Yorker profile on Stanton pointed out ahead of the release, John Carter would have to take in $700 million worldwide to make any money. That’s a gross at the level of Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers, or Spider-Man.
So Rich Ross did what every beleaguered studio boss has to do when under duress. In November 2011, four months before the movie’s launch, he scapegoated his marketing head M. T. Carney and replaced her with Hollywood insider Ricky Strauss. He came into a tough situation and started to right the ship by admitting that, yes, the core target audience was male—young males, the ones who tune into the fanboy demo and should have been targeted at Comic-Con the previous summer. That was a start, and sure enough, Austin, Texas’s webmaster to the fanboys, Harry Knowles, who had been a producer when James Jacks’s John Carter of Mars was in development at Paramount, gave the film a rave on his Ain’t It Cool News website.
When I saw John Carter at its LA Live premiere, I thought so many things might have been fixed by a more experienced studio production team. For the most part, Disney had let headstrong Stanton do his thing until he showed them a rough cut. The main story elements—gravity-enhanced jaded ex-soldier Carter (Kitsch), who can leap across the barren Barsoom landscape (Utah); his romance with spoiled Martian princess Dejah Thoris (Collins); his alliance with honorable Thark chief Tars Tarkas (voiced by Willem Dafoe); and various bat
tles with Martian creatures and armies—played fairly well. Tellingly, the best thing in the movie was Carter’s toothy pet Woola, who was animated.
But so much also went wrong. For starters, the film (which gained nothing from badly retrofitted 3-D) opened right in the middle of a confusing Martian air battle and took too long to bring Civil War vet Carter to red planet Barsoom. The crucial design of the green, nine-foot-tall, tusked, and four-armed Tharks was misguided (too much like Lucas’s infamous digital misfire Jar Jar Binks), many of the large-scale air battles were murky and overpixelated, and Collins as the princess of Mars boasted an inexact Brit accent. These were fixable mistakes among myriad others, like exactly who among this motley crew you were supposed to root for. Finally, Stanton was so close to the material that he didn’t know how to make this live-action film coherent and engaging.
The reviews did not help.
The Hollywood Reporter: “If ‘Avatar’ had never existed, it’s possible that ‘John Carter’ would have seemed like more of a genre breakthrough. Although the result is quite a mishmash, dramatic coherence prevails over visual flair.”
The Playlist: “‘John Carter’ is a mess. Strangely uninvolving and needlessly convoluted, ‘John Carter’ spends over two hours making the case for being a franchise, without ever really becoming a movie.”
The damage had been done. Iger might have wanted to break his studio away from its hidebound traditions and practices. He had long been straining to move more swiftly into the digital future, taking full advantage of the studio’s legacy and brand identification with audiences all over the world. That approach worked like a charm for Ross at the Disney Channel. But bringing too many outsiders into a movie studio often courts disaster. The rules of this world are too entrenched and arcane—the egos too sensitive, the need to be on top of the latest marketing trends too great—for there to be any margin for error. Smart as he was, Ross had too much to learn.
Although former Disney chief Michael Eisner, Bob Daly of Warner Bros., Columbia/Universal’s Frank Price, and Paramount/Fox’s Barry Diller were able to transition from television to movies, all were sharp enough to know what they didn’t know and to surround themselves with talent who did. Most of the time it’s a risky move—as it was at Paramount with NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff and, decades later, with Fox TV’s Gail Berman. There, too, Paramount owner Sumner Redstone of Viacom charged his then lieutenant, MTV chief Tom Freston, with making radical changes at the studio and then threw the exec and others under the bus when the pace of change proved too fast. (Freston’s biggest mistake: letting Twentieth Century Fox snag MySpace!) New Paramount chief Brad Grey jettisoned the old Paramount team and brought in Berman, who had been a television success, but wasn’t able to navigate the shoals of the movie business. Even though buying DreamWorks didn’t work out for Grey—the two companies kept fighting for territory—he saved his job as DreamWorks decamped by importing its executives and successful creative culture to buttress Paramount’s flailing one.
Disney’s Iger made his changes at a cost. In the wake of the biggest write-off in Hollywood history, that $200 million dollar Hoover Dam of red ink, Ross was forced to step down, citing a lack of passion for the job.
That’s because John Carter was a tidal wave disaster that no studio chief could survive, even if he did inherit it. Truth is, Carter was surrounded by too few mitigating hits that Ross could claim—no one was going to give him credit for the inherited Pirates of the Caribbean sequel or The Muppets—and too many money-losers, from the worst films of producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s career to Ross’s own The Prom. In Hollywood, you can fire the head of marketing, as Ross did, letting go of Carney as the dimensions of the John Carter debacle became clear, but you can’t escape the ax without some claim to success.
Disney’s only Oscar traction under Ross’s tenure came from Pixar’s long-in-the-works Toy Story 3 and Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider’s Tiffany boutique DreamWorks, which produced The Help, War Horse, and Visual Effects Oscar nominee Real Steel. But DreamWorks made clear it was miserable with Carney and her marketing team, and was pushing for more change. Iger needed someone with the authority to manage these high-octane star players.
He did not make the same mistake twice. Brought in to take over the movie studio was a valuable piece of experienced talent who had run Warner Bros. for twelve years: seventyish Alan Horn, a well-regarded éminence grise who knew how to run a company, could take credit for the Harry Potter series and Warner’s franchise strategy, and handle big creative egos and labels.
Horn came in just as Disney was poised to open two enormous blockbusters from studio labels over which Ross had little oversight—Marvel’s The Avengers and Pixar’s Brave. And Iger had another trick up his sleeve that played brilliantly on Wall Street: Disney scooped up the rights to the biggest franchise of all time, Star Wars, by buying George Lucas’s Bay Area Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion. This was going to feed the theme parks, stores, and TV and film studios for decades to come.
Iger made it clear during a conference call after the October 30, 2012, announcement that he’d rather pay through the nose for an established brand than risk creating anything new. He was banking on longtime Spielberg producer Kathleen Kennedy, whom Lucas had already appointed as president of Lucasfilm when he retired, to take Lucas’s blueprint for new Star Wars episodes and reinvent the series with fresh writers and directors. Kennedy was already prepared to reboot the movie franchise with the original cast, a script by Toy Story 3 scribe Michael Arndt, and the director behind Paramount’s successful Star Trek relaunch, J. J. Abrams. (Paramount’s Grey was not happy when he heard the news.)
Star Wars: Episode VII is due for release in 2015. Disney will stick to its plan to release each year one to two Marvel films, one Pixar animated film, one Disney animated film, and four to six live-action films; Star Wars would take one of the annual live-action tentpole slots—and could be exploited in TV as well. Said Iger on the announcement conference call: “Star Wars is one of the great entertainment brands of all time.”
With those headlines blazing, John Carter and Rich Ross were soon forgotten.
But John Carter did provide a super-size cautionary tale for other studio heads, who came to recognize that in today’s viral media world, audiences can suss out a must-to-avoid pretty fast. Via mobile tweets and texts, bad word can make hundreds of millions of investment dollars disappear overnight. The studios saw that they’d better deliver audiences something eye-popping, or millions could go down the drain. It had become clear that while the conventional wisdom was that big-budget tentpoles tend to yield more profits than smaller pictures, they also carry more risks at escalating levels of production and marketing.
Several studios began pushing back films for reshoots and editing-room tinkering so that they could put their best foot forward. And if John Carter didn’t persuade them, Universal’s $220 million Battleship did. That was a movie that no one expected to be good—not even Universal—but somehow its production kept moving forward; the movie was developed by Hasbro Films, and the studio jumped on signing Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Hancock) when he threatened to leave for another project. Studio chiefs Adam Fogelson and Donna Langley considered killing it, but they didn’t because the movie filled a needed slot in the studio’s global film and TV distribution pipeline.
As these giant trains gain momentum, and tens of millions of dollars are invested, it becomes difficult to maneuver them, much less apply the brakes. And when the time came to create trailers and TV spots, the studio belatedly realized that the big VFX shots they were using to sell the movie too closely resembled another entrenched franchise, Transformers, also from Hasbro. One risk with franchises is winding up with something too familiar that audiences feel they have seen before and can afford to skip—like too-costly Men in Black 3, Dark Shadows, The Amazing Spider-Man, and a second X-Men film with “Wolverine” in the title.
Universal and Hasbro forgot that what makes a successful franc
hise work is not a name or title but an immersive world and characters that people care about. Battleship, which finally opened on May 18, 2012, to 41 percent rotten reviews on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, had none of those things. The studio tried to mitigate the weak numbers by first opening overseas. It eked out a miserable $65.4 million domestically and $238 million foreign, resulting in a $150 million loss for the studio.
With bad word swirling on John Carter and Battleship, Paramount pushed back by a year its sequel G.I. Joe: Retaliation, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, to put in more time on making it 3-D and to beef up rising star Channing Tatum’s role (total worldwide gross: $375.7 million). It did the same with its troubled $220 million zombie epic World War Z, starring Brad Pitt, which required a costly page-one rewrite and reshoot of its last forty minutes. Both came out better than they might have: World War Z even earned good reviews (total worldwide gross: $540 million). Similarly, Universal postponed the release of its beleaguered $200 million Keanu Reeves period martial arts actioner, 47 Ronin, until December 2013. Whether or not the studios score a franchise, at these cost levels they can’t afford to lose their shirts.
THE HUNGER GAMES
Just as Disney was announcing a $200 million write-off on John Carter, a new movie produced by ex-Disney production president Nina Jacobson was hitting big at the box office. A brilliant and openly gay story executive with stints at Universal and DreamWorks behind her, Jacobson was pushed out of Disney by Dick Cook in 2006 (as her partner happened to be giving birth to their third child). Since then indie producer Jacobson—who opted not to ally herself with a studio, preferring to go her own way project by project, in order to retain more control—had already spawned a successful franchise on her own at Fox (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) and produced Lone Scherfig’s One Day, starring Anne Hathaway, at Focus Features.
The $11 Billion Year Page 7