John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

by Sellers, Michael D.

  Because I had been thinking about it for awhile, I had a very clear outline of how the trailer should be structured. The official theatrical trailer was perceived to be all spectacle and CGI -- and yet I, like any Burroughs fan, knew that there was a story with a beating heart there that wasn’t getting communicated by the trailers.

  So the plan was:

  Act 1 - the first thirty seconds - would be spent introducing John Carter and showing how he gets to Mars.

  Act II would run for one minute and would introduce Mars -- and unlike the Disney approach which focused on the white ape scene and other scenes all set relentlessly in a barren desert environment, I wanted to introduce Mars not as a barren, drab desert -- but to start with rich, colorful images of the vibrant societies of Helium and Zodanga, images that had always been dominant in my own mind as he contemplated the Barsoom of Burroughs books. I also wanted to establish and reinforce early in Act II of the trailer the love story between John Carter and Dejah Thoris so as to make clear to the viewer what was causing John Carter to be engaged in the action scenes that would be presented, particularly in act three.

  Then in Act III, there would be the final cataclysm of action and romance, leaving everything unresolved.

  And finally -- the trailer could not end with John Carter leaping into the charging Warhoons as it had been this ending that created the unintended laughter that I had heard in the theater when he watched the trailer in a packed house. There would need to be a tag at the end that was mysterious, alluring, and which left the viewer wondering about the mystery and magic of Barsoom.

  There were two other key elements that I felt were very important to include -- references to both Stanton and Burroughs. The film had a pedigree and the audience needed to know that. There would be two graphic cards: “From the Director of Wall-E and Finding Nemo” and “From the Epic Tale That Inspired 100 Years of Film-making.” I felt strongly that placing these two cards at the beginning of Act II would change the way the audience reacted to everything it saw from that point onward.

  We went at it for eight hours, well into the night, and then it was done. Our impression when we finished it was that it was good. It was basically a mashup of Disney trailer elements, not a completely new trailer -- but one that revealed enough of the story and the characters for the audience to become engaged -- while not giving away spoilers.

  At the end of it, we uploaded the John Carter Fan Trailer to YouTube, set it to “Private” and called it a day.

  The next day, February 6, I watched the trailer with fresh eyes and remained convinced it was a substantial improvement. But was it really better trailer, or was this just my own bias causing me to believe it was better?

  It occurred to me that a first step, before anything else, would be to “focus group” the trailer, presenting it neutrally to viewers who would rate it side by side with the main official theatrical trailer. If the results came back that our trailer polled substantially better than the theatrical trailer, that would be one thing. If it didn’t .... well, we would know.

  So on February 7, I posted the trailer to The John Carter Files with the following text, which did not expose who had created the trailer or why:241

  Poll: John Carter Trailer Survey

  The JohnCarterFiles.com is trying to obtain some genuine market feedback regarding John Carter Trailers. We appreciate your thoughtful participation. It has been set so that only one vote per person is allowed, so after you vote you just see the results — you can’t vote more than once from any one IP Address. We’re trying to keep this real. And please do not vote unless you view both trailers and give it some serious thought.

  We encourage you to leave comments. This is all about trying to help in any way we can to make this movie have a successful outcome.

  Which John Carter trailer makes you more interested in seeing the movie in theaters?

  Trailer 1: This is the existing trailer that is playing in theaters now.

  Trailer 2: This is a new draft trailer for consideration as an alternative.

  Readers were then invited to vote and leave comments. Within hours the trend was clear, and by the end of the first 24 hours total votes were 119/20 in favor of the new trailer. Comments flooded in as well, supporting the new trailer:

  Khanada T: The draft trailer is just magnificent!! I love them all but the test trailer pulls some of the best bits together and it, or something similar, should be in theaters. The mention of 100 years inspiring films is huge too!

  Terry C: So far the test trailer is the best of them all. Sadly, I don’t believe the powers that be have been listening. If they had been listening all this time we would have seen a different direction in the marketing of the film.

  Rudy: By far the best trailer is the 2nd draft one-nice to see that it shows that it is 100 years in the making and also gives credit to Stanton as director

  Billy York: Trailer #2. In the Draft test it shows more of a romantic connection that I think will be very important to bring in the females but enough action to bring in the males.

  Seymour: I think the draft trailer is so much better! I like the intro that shows a bit of how he ended up there; it gives context to the rest of the plot. I also like the reference to the fact that the story is 100 years old as well as the mention of the director’s credits.

  Abraham Sherman: The test trailer is the best of the ones I’ve seen. It best captures the basics of the story, and it shows the action, gives moments of the romance, conveys the loyalty of Woola, and highlights the selling points of the director and legacy of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  MCR: It looks much better playing up the story and the action scenes and I did like the mention of the story being influential.

  Patrick D: Disney, are you paying attention? Good movies are not about mere spectacle, but characters and story. The test trailer gives viewers a much clearer view of those elements. Equally important, it places “John Carter” in context: “The epic tale that inspired 100 years of filmmaking.” You’ve invested too much money in this project for your advertising to fall so woefully short. Do something about it before it’s too late!

  Nightshadesiris: DEFINITELY THE TEST TRAILER! The most important part is the mention of “From the Epic Tale that Inspired 100 years of Filmmaking.” Since that has not been mentioned in any previous trailers, people are writing off this movie as a ripoff and are not interested in seeing it!! Believe me I know this is true – not just by all the negative comments on You Tube, but from hearing it first hand.

  I took the post down off the site and contemplated the next move. Was there a legit chance to get Disney to look at the test trailer and contemplate using it?

  My reality self said -- are you kidding?

  My dream-self said yes, why not?

  By now I had figured out some things about Disney email addresses and so I put together an email with an explanation and links to a password protected page with the trailer poll and the two trailers on it, and sent it to a handful of top Disney executives on the hope that one of them might see something of value. After giving it considerable thought, I did not send it to Ryan Stankevich or Samantha Garry, the two Disney executives whom we had met. My feeling was that they had clearly defined the parameters of the relationship as fan liaison and this Hail Mary exceeded that and I was worried that pushing the envelope in this way might damage whatever fan liaison possibilities existed. Instead I sent it to the top players in the studio and hoped something good would happen.

  I also sent the link to the trailer to members of the film crew from John Carter who had corresponded with The John Carter Files, and whose email addresses I had. I heard back from several of them -- enthusiastic replies.

  I waited, wondering if I would hear anything from Disney.

  I didn’t hold my breath.

  “Great Fan Trailer: They Get it!”

  The social media tracking that box office prognosticators had been using thus far is different from the “traditional tracking” th
at the studios start receiving four weeks prior to release. This traditional tracking is a polling service that all the studios subscribe to, and reflects telephone polls of potential movie goers which establish percentages for “unaided awareness” (“Have you heard of a movie called John Carter?); aided awareness (“Have you heard of any big sci-fi movies coming out soon?”), “definite interest” (“Are you definitely interested in seeing John Carter in theaters?”) and “first choice” (“Of all the upcoming movies, what is your first choice?”).

  John Carter’s figures first came online for the studio trackers on the morning of February 16 and that evening, Deadline Hollywood broke the story with an article: ‘John Carter’ Tracking Shockingly Soft: “Could Be Biggest Write-off of All Time” which reported:242

  Hollywood is in a tizzy over the early tracking which just came online this morning for Walt Disney Studio’s John Carter opening March 9th. “Not good. 2 unaided, 53 aware, 27 definitely interested, 3 first choice,” a senior exec at a rival studio emails me. Another writes me, ”It just came out. Women of all ages have flat out rejected the film. The tracking for John Carter is shocking for a film that cost over $250 million. This could be the biggest writeoff of all time.” I’m hearing figures in the neighborhood of $100 million. And the studio isn’t even trying to spin reports of the 3D pic’s bloated budget any more.

  To put the numbers in perspective -- four weeks out from the release of a movie at the very top tier in terms of production investment, the marketing in a deep, deep hole. Marketing is a process--and creating awareness is the first step in the process. With an abysmal 2% unaided awareness, John Carter was not even remotely “in the ballpark” of where it needed to be at this juncture. Also the huge gap between “unaided awareness” of 2% and “aided awareness” of 53% spoke to the eminently forgettable nature of the title.

  On February 21st Chris Lee at The Daily Beast ran an article entitled “John Carter: Disney’s Quarter Billion Dollar Movie Fiasco,”243

  Around Hollywood, Disney’s quarter-billion-dollar 3-D epic John Carter holds a dubious renown: it’s the film with Avatar-size ambitions that’s being greeted sight unseen as the next Ishtar. . . If Hollywood executives don’t know who John Carter is, they certainly know what John Carter is. It’s the kind of cautionary tale that keeps studio chiefs popping Ambien at night: a vanity project with sky-high expectations and a humongous budget that now seems destined to land with a massive thud at the box office—unless it can somehow rake in more than $400 million to break even. In other words, it’s the kind of movie that causes heads to roll.

  Andrew Stanton heard the bad news about the tracking on the morning of the 16th as he was just about to depart on a four stop press junket in support of the movie. But what could he do except grit his teeth and grind through it? He had long held that he could only truly be responsible for what happens once audience members were in their seats to view the film, and he truly believed he had created a film that would weave a spell as intensely satisfying to audience members as he had with Finding Nemo and Wall-E. It was distressing to hear the weak tracking numbers, but it didn’t shake his faith in the film itself.

  But there were two things he could do, and would do.

  First, he was going to come out with guns blazing on the junket on the issue of the supposed “out-of-control-production” which had supposedly “ballooned” to the level of $300M because of “costly unplanned reshoots.” That simply wasn’t true. He had been waiting for someone from Disney to set the record straight since Kim Masters article had come out on January 19th in The Hollywood Reporter. Well, no one had -- and so now he was going to do it.

  At the first round-table in Arizona, where the press junket was kicking off, Stanton let go and the result hit the wires the next day, with IndieWire being one of the first to post Stanton’s counterpunch under the headline: “Andrew Stanton Says Rumor that John Carter Cost $300M Is A “Complete and Utter Lie”244

  To say that the development of Disney's "John Carter" has been scrutinized would be an understatement. The project itself has been in the works for years with a handful of directors (Jon Favreau and Robert Rodriguez among them) working on it, but never quite cracking the sci-fi space epic. However, it was Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton ("Wall-E," "Finding Nemo") who finally got the ball rolling and for his live action debut, he couldn't have asked for a bigger challenge. And indeed he's been closely watched every step of the way, with rumors growing loud as the film shifted release dates, dropped "Of Mars" from its initial title and slowly started earning concerned buzz, with reports showing up in the trades suggesting that his inexperience led to reshoots that pushed the budget to a staggering $300 million (a figure most recently tossed around in The Hollywood Reporter, but Stanton is now fighting back.

  This week, a massive press get-together for "John Carter" was held in Arizona and Movieline was there and found Stanton in a fighting spirt. Calling reports about the rumored $300 million budget “a complete and utter lie” Stanton insisted the studio was fully behind him: “I want to go completely on record that I literally was on budget and on time the entire shoot. Disney is so completely psyched that I stayed on budget and on time that they let me have a longer reshoot because I was such a good citizen, so I find it ironic that we’re getting accused of the opposite.”

  Similar articles appeared across the web, and Producer Lindsey Collins added her voice to forcefully back up Stanton:245

  "It's frustrating, because it's wrong," Lindsey Collins, one of the film's co-producers, says of years of trade reports that the film, the first live-action effort from Oscar-winning "WALL-E" director Andrew Stanton, was a bloated, over-budget mess.

  "There's no way to talk about it without sounding defensive, but I'm going to sound defensive for a second and say this movie was made on budget," Collins asserted. "I think Disney took a huge leap of faith with us early on and said, Okay, we believe your number and it's higher than we wanted but we believe it so make it for that ... And in fact, in most areas, it came in under, and the one area we came in slightly over was offset by all the underages of the others, so it came within I think two percent of the budget."

  The budget they say they hit was $250 million, which went into live shoots in desert locations and massive computer graphic work to create an elaborate world in which a leather-clad Taylor Kitsch, as Carter, leaps into a war between two rival nations and a race of green, horned, four-armed natives. Barsoom, as Mars is called by its inhabitants, is a rocky desert-scape littered with ornate cities, mystical ruins and anachronistic flying machines. And it's one that took over seventy-five years of technological development to make believable on the screen.

  But while Collins backed up Stanton, no one from Disney had anything to say about it, leaving it to the director and his producers to attempt to set the record straight with a version of the story that was, in fact, essentially correct, at least insofar as any budget Stanton or Collins had been shown was concerned. No one in the production knew what studio overhead or other charges might have been added, and this might explain Disney’s silence -- although as with most other incidents in the John Carter rollout, simple inattention and lack of focus seems more likely to be the explanation for the lack of support from Disney.

  With that salvo out of the way, Stanton took another damage control step. A fan trailer had been forwarded to him by one of the members of the production team some days earlier, and Stanton had been struck by how well it showcased the film. The trailer was essentially a reorganized mashup of bits and pieces from all the trailers and TV spots that had been released to date, yet it did something that no trailer or TV spot had done previously, and that was to put forward the basic storyline of the film in a compelling way that that captured what Stanton would later call “the DNA of the film we’ve made.”

  Throughout the production and promotion of John Carter, Stanton had been doing his part by tweeting regularly, including weekly Friday Q and A’s with fans that were lively and ha
d caused his Twitter following to grow substantially.

  On February 19th, three days after the “soft tracking” report had hit, he tweeted:246

  “Great Fan Trailer. They get it!”

  At the end of the tweet was a link to “view media,” allowing the fan trailer to play in the Twitter feed.247

  It would be a tweet that started a chain reaction of rare positivity for the beleaguered film.

  A Glimmer of Hope?

  As Stanton was tweeting, I was on my couch putting the finishing touches on an article for The John Carter Files entitled “Yes, there is a path to success for John Carter.”248 In the article I made the case that woeful as the tracking figures were, there were four weeks to go and there was historical precedent for the type of improvement in the tracking numbers that John Carter would need to achieve to have an opening weekend that would be regarded as marginally successful, or at least not the disaster that everyone was predicting.

  ......... the “path to success” for Disney in this situation, being realistic, is to get from 52/27 aware/definitely interested to 70/40, which would put it a bit higher than Super 8 [which opened at $37M] was tracking coming into opening weekend. Disney can get to this “Aware” number pretty much by brute force — just keep advertising with greater and greater intensity; turn on the publicity machine that will flood the media with articles, interviews, etc and Awareness should go to 70. Definitely interested will increase but likely only to 35 or so (i.e. the same ratio as now, roughly 2/1, Aware/Definitely Interested) unless the quality of the advertising and promotion improves. But another way of looking at it is that to get to 40 definitely interested, Disney only needs to pick up 5 “quality points” with better advertising — that being the five points between 35 Definitely interested (where they will land if they get aware to 70 and nothing changes in the quality of the advertising) and 40, if they do better and convert from Aware to Definitely Interested at a better rate than they are now.