John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

by Sellers, Michael D.

  Challenge number one was what was known in brand strategy circles as “brand misalignment” or “brand incongruency” -- a situation in which the product being promoted is not in alignment or congruency with the brand it is being sold under. Rich Ross had consolidated down to three brands: Disney (family), Pixar (animation), and Marvel (superhero/action).126

  Was JCOM a good fit as a Disney-branded release?

  Disney was one of the most storied brands in the world and it was perfectly well understood the “brand promise” of Disney was “fun family entertainment.” Recently this had been officially revised internally at Disney to be “entertainment with heart” -- an attempt to broaden the brand promise. While this broadening may have been understood within Disney, to the general public it was still “fun family entertainment.”

  However, for 100 years the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian series of books had been sold not as family entertainment. Instead, it promised that the story within would be heart-pounding romantic adventure in a richly imagined fantastical setting. The imagery associated with the novels had always been that of sword-bearing John Carter protecting scantily clad Dejah Thoris from threat by fantastical creatures. The stories themselves -- told in first person by grown man of in-determinant age who hacked his way to a substantial body count of dead Tharks and Zodangans as he pursued romantic acceptance by the Princess of the title--were clearly intended for adults at the time they were written. Indeed, the one essential ingredient in family friendly adventure -- the presence of teenage or younger characters -- was completely absent. There were no teen or child characters in Burroughs’ books, nor would there be in Stanton’s movie.

  What were the options?

  Because the Disney brand is so strong and specific, and the brand promise so well understood, Disney had long ago realized that in order to participate in a wider range of films than the Disney brand allowed, it needed to have a non-Disney-branded way of participating with films that don’t meet the very precise “brand congruency” or “brand alignment” requirements of a “Disney” branded film. Disney did this by creating three alternate labels under which it released films that didn’t precisely meet the definition of a “Disney” film. These alternate labels include Buena Vista, Hollywood Pictures, and Touchstone Pictures. Recent examples of films released under the Touchstone label include The Help, Step Up 3D, War Horse, The Tempest, and sci-fi pictures I Am Number Four and Real Steel. Buena Vista Pictures has been used as the label for Wild Hogs, Bridge to Terabithia, The Game Plan, and Ratatouille, and even one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies -- Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Notably 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, under development at the time John Carter went into production, was slated as a Buena Vista Pictures release. The Hollywood Pictures label was used for, among others, Michael Bay’s The Rock.

  Yet under Iger and Ross Disney had “semi-retired” the Buena Vista and Touchstone labels. JCOM would go out as a Disney branded film -- no other option was acceptable to Ross or Iger. After all, the argument went, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise was PG-13 and did just fine as a Disney release. The counterargument was that the Pirates of the Caribbean films had been based on a wildly popular theme park ride, and had been carefully co-branded as Jerry Bruckheimer Films productions, which blurred any incongruence in a way that JCOM, without a co-brand, would not. This was crucial. Bruckheimer was a preeminent brand for adult action films with a storied history that included Con-Air, Armageddon, Blackhawk Down, Pearl Harbor, Gone in Sixty Seconds, and National Treasure. Co-branding with Bruckheimer was a shrewd move which assured that adult audiences who might be put off by the Disney logo on an action film, would be reassured. The Avengers, in the pipeline behind John Carter, would go out as a “Marvel Studios” release with virtually no mention of Disney in the promotion.

  John Carter would, for better or worse, go into the market branded as pure Disney.

  This left MT Carney with two choices -- sell it as what it really was and just let the misalignment with the Disney brand exist; or somehow try to make the square peg that was John Carter fit into the round hole that was the Disney brand. And in the end, that was the decision that was made: Carney would build a campaign that kept it on the Disney brand reservation even if that meant de-emphasizing the very elements that had made the series popular and influential for a century.

  The First Marketing Blunder

  After the announcement on January 19, 2011, that John Carter of Mars would move its release date forward from June 8 to March 9, 2012, Disney went silent once again on the publicity front. One reason was that MT Carney and her team were preoccupied first with the looming disaster that was Mars Needs Moms, and secondarily with Carney’s efforts to come to grips with both the brand misalignment she saw in JCOM, and the recent history of films with “Mars” in the title doing poorly -- this last being a problem that was certain to be exacerbated when the anemic Mars Needs Moms reached theaters exactly one year ahead of JCOM.

  In Carney’s view, the pulpy, geeky, John Carter of Mars title unnecessarily excluded large portions of the audience that would be needed if the film was to avoid being as big a disaster as Mars Needs Moms was likely to be.

  Carney’s solution: drop “of Mars” from the title and go with the simple “John Carter.”

  Carney organized focus group testing, the results of which supported her contention that a wider audience could be attracted by dropping “of Mars” from the title. She presented her findings to Rich Ross and got his concurrence.

  That left Andrew Stanton to be convinced.

  Carney found Stanton difficult to deal with, and so she proceeded cautiously. In late 2010, the first work on a what would eventually become the first trailer was begun, and members of the team visited Stanton and presented their work, which Stanton rejected on a number of occasions. One production team member familiar with the early trailers brought in said: “They were all one version or another of ‘in a world where’ generic trailers and Andrew was all about it not being generic. Then on January 27, 2011, a week after announcing the March 9 release date switch, Disney hired Frank Chiocchi, an EVP of marketing at Universal whom Hollywood reporter called “one of the best in the business in regards to trailers” as the new head of creative media for all live-action titles, reporting directly to MT Carney.127 Chiocchi had come up through the ranks of the industry, staring in radio in Phoenix, then owning an ad agency there. He moved into film marketing in 1996 with top agency CmP (now called mOcean) then moved to Universal in 2002 where he oversaw both print and audio visual campaigns. He was assigned to deal with Stanton.

  Chiocchi, with Stanton’s blessing, brought in Joseph Tamusaitis, an award winning creative director whose previous work included the trailer for Pixar’s “Up” and Disney’s “Prince of Persia.”

  Over a period of several months Chiocchi and Tamusaitis struggled to find an approach to the trailer that Stanton would accept. Finally in March, during reshoots at the La Playa stage near LAX, Tamusaitis showed up with a completely new version using Peter Gabriel’s “My Body is a Cage” and it was instantly “problem solved” for Stanton. From that point forward, work on the teaser trailer went smoothly, at least from Stanton and the production team’s standpoint. “It was a clear breakthrough moment and everyone felt it would work — and Andrew clearly felt justified in having been hardheaded about it,” explained one of those present on the production side.

  The trailer was clearly not the one that Carney had wanted to put out there; the earlier efforts which Stanton had nixed, and which were much closer to the eventual main theatrical trailer that would hit screens December, represented her take on what was needed.

  So, who was in charge of the marketing?

  Did Stanton have the power to veto the trailers that the marketing team were presenting to him?

  Technically, no -- he did not have absolute veto power. As director he had what is defined contractually as “meaningful consultation” on trailers, key art
, and so on - but not absolute approval. In sending the trailer back to be reworked repeatedly, Stanton was treading a fine line, but he felt justified in pushing for the all important “first impression” to be different.

  As for Chiocchi and Tamusaitis -- they were caught between their need to satisfy two bosses who had different views, Stanton and Carney. The dynamic of a first time director trumping a studio marketing chief was an unusual one -- but it was an unusual situation. The marketing chief was inexperienced and overloaded; Stanton had the Pixar “clout factor” working in his favor, and it was still early days so on the first trailer, Stanton was largely given his way. MT Carney and her team felt it focused too much on the love story, and there wasn’t enough action in it, and especially not enough eye-popping special effects (even though this is a common problem with most “first trailers” for VFX laden films -- the major VFX shots often aren’t ready by the time the first teaser trailer comes out). By late May 2011 the trailer had been approved and was set for a July debut.

  After the prickly experience with the trailer, Carney left it to Rich Ross to break the news to Stanton about the title change. The meeting occurred soon after the trailer had been locked, and was one of the few face to face meetings between Ross and Stanton during production and completion of the film Ross explained Carney’s theory that “of Mars” was narrowing the audience unacceptably, and that focus group testing confirmed that reducing the title to “John Carter” would open it up to a larger audience.

  Stanton was taken aback. He had been the originator of the title change from A Princess of Mars, the title of Burroughs’ book, to John Carter of Mars, claiming that he felt that “Princess” in the title of a Disney made movie would drive the male audience away. But he had never contemplated dropping “of Mars.”

  “Stanton bristled at first; he wasn’t in love with the title change at all. But it was presented to him as a done deal -- not an item for his approval, and his only option other than accepting it would have been to throw a tantrum and threaten to quit. He didn’t do that. He accepted it,” said a production colleague who was among the early group to hear from Stanton about the meeting with Ross. “After giving it some thought, he eventually concluded that from a creative point of view John Carter becomes ‘John Carter of Mars’ through the course of the first movie, and that helped him make his peace with it on a creative level.”

  When giving interviews in 2011, Stanton, putting forward a united front with the studio, gave the impression that he had been the author of the name change. But later he gave a more definitive explanation for what had happened, and how:128

  At the time there was panic about Mars Needs Moms. That wasn’t convincing to me to do anything. Then they did all this testing and found out that a huge bulk of people were saying no off the title. You can’t lie about that stuff, that’s the response you’re getting. I was like ‘Eh, that’s what the movie is.’ But I don’t want to hurt people from coming to the movie. Then I realized the movie is about that arc [of John Carter's character], and I said, ‘I’ll change it if you let me change it at the end. And if you let me keep the JCM logo.’ Because it means something by the end of the movie, and if there are more movies I want that to be what you remember. It may seem like an odd thing, but I wanted it to be the reverse Harry Potter. With the latest Harry Potter they had Harry Potter and the Blah Blah Blah Blah, but you just see the HP. I wanted the JCM to mean something.

  Until now Stanton and the production team had been referring to the project as JCOM. Now that “of Mars” was gone, they would begin referring to it as ‘Carter.

  At Disney, with the decision to change the title now in place, the focus shifted to the question of how and when to announce it -- and how to make sure that it was received positively.

  In this, Carney’s inexperience played a role.

  The Roots of Negativity

  The announcement of the title change was by far the biggest “marketing moment” of the campaign up to this point. It was a decision which, it could be reasonably assumed, would be second guessed by many of the influencers whom Disney needed to maintain as allies, and who had been following the movie for years, always as John Carter of Mars.129

  The solution selected by MT Carney was to leak the information to Garth Franklin of Dark Horizons, who in turn tweeted about it: “John Carter of Mars is now just John Carter.”130

  Reaction to the title change was uniformly hostile across the dozen or so entertainment outlets that reported it. Adam Chitwood at Collider.com called it “disappointing,”131 while at CinemaBlend Eric Eisenberg called it “quite confounding,”132 and GeekTyrant’s Joey Paur called it “stupid” and a “brain fart,” adding: “That’s a boring title and it’s just distanced itself even further from the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic novels from which the film was adapted. So how is that helping the movie? It’s not.”133

  Slashfilm’s Germain Lussier wrote:134

  Double Academy Award-winning director of Finding Nemo and WALL-E, Andrew Stanton, is currently working on his first foray into live action, an adaptation of the classic sci-fi fantasy novel John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. For some reason, though, Disney has now changed the title from that to “Gary Carter,” the Hall Of Fame catcher for the 1986 New York Mets. No, I’m sorry. I meant John Carter. That’s the new official title. For real.

  Clearly and unequivocally, the title change had landed with a thud.

  It was time for a little damage control.

  What Reputation Management?

  As an executive familiar with digital marketing best practices, Carney’s team would be expected to have been paying attention to not only the articles by entertainment journalists and bloggers -- but also the comments by readers, as well as comments on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks and micro-blogs. Such monitoring, with quick response capabilities ready to be deployed, is a standard feature of what is commonly referred to as reputation management, with the reputation being that of the brand that is in play -- in this case, “John Carter.”

  Echo Research,135 one of the top Reputation Management providers, describes the tools normally employed to monitor reputation, include: “competitive benchmarking, reputation scorecards, key performance indicators, journalist surveys, media content analysis, new media measurement..... reputation survey and analysis, PR and communications measurement and rating methodologies.” Software programs that are readily available and used by studios and independent distributors allow the studio to monitor the “chatter” and assess how much buzz is being generated, and quickly determine the positive/negative ratio. It is widely considered to be an important marketing tool -- and particularly so when dealing with a theatrical release, where there are no “do-overs.” Recognizing a “reputation problem” and taking steps to correct it is a critical function, and one which -- on something as sensitive as changing the name of a brand -- would normally be expected to be a high priority for any company, and especially so for a $250M theatrical film.

  Apart from the negative comments by the influencers who posted their articles -- what sort of reader comments were appearing on the sites covering the name change?

  The comments on the Slashfilm article typical of the reaction across the internet:136

  Ken Cosgrove: John Carter? That's the one where Samuel L. Jackson plays a basketball coach, right?

  Octoberist: John Carter sounds generic while 'John Carter of Mars' sounds more pulpy and kinda bold. Bad move, and I hope Disney changes it back.

  DNWilliams: The should, but they won't. Rapunzel became Tangled, The Bear & The Bow became Brave...it's a trend.

  The Dead Burger: I need to pay more attention to John Carter; I just noticed that Stanton directed my two favorite Pixar movies. Gotta put that one on my list.

  Marley L: In Andrew Stanton I Trust....

  Andreas C: The only reason I can see to change the title of "John Carter of Mars" would be that simply "John Carter" could work better with sequels, but aside fr
om that, the title change makes no sense at all. Very odd.

  Monster Killed the Pilot: 'John Carter' will look lame on the movie poster.

  Ian T: If I were at Disney, I'd be afraid people assumed John Carter was that guy from the Terminator movies.

  Mudassir C: or the doctor from ER

  VSK: Did they mean John Carter the ER doctor?

  VL: The bad news just keeps rolling in. Andrew Stanton has done plenty to earn trust, don't get me wrong, but everything (except the Giacchino score) sounds like this is going in the wrong direction.

  The net result? Carney had tried to reposition the film in a more favorable way for the millions of non-geek, non-influencer, non-fanboy viewers who would never hear of the film until much closer to the release date. In so doing, she had sowed the seeds of distrust and disappointment among the early influencer audience who tracked movies far in advance; commented on blogs; wrote about them on message boards, Facebook, and Twitter, and generally set the tone, positive or negative, that would become the “buzz foundation” long before the casual audience that was the target of the name change even started paying attention. It was an entirely predictable response.