John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood
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AP’s Christy Lemire (March7): “Yes there’s life on Mars and it’s deadly dull.”
Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir (March 7): “You can feel Stanton struggling to bring the confidence, wit and style of “Wall’E” and “Finding Nemo” to bear upon this leviathan, but he can’t quite pull it off.
Chicago Tribune’s Michael Philips (March 8): “ The major problem here is one of rooting interest. I hate to sound like a mogul, or a focus group ho, but at the center of this picture is a flat, inexpressive protagonist played by a flat, inexpressive actor.”
Then, miraculously it seemed, on March 8, Global Financial News Service predicted a $57M opening. Could it possibly be true? By the end of the day on March 8, all of the predictions were in, and they ranged from the $57M from Global Financial News, to the LA Times at $22.5M.
57.0 | RTT NASDAQ
38.9 | Box Office Mojo
29.5 | Screen Crave
30.0 | Variety
30.0 | Hollywood Reporter
29.0 | Coming Soon.net
26.0 | Entertainment Wkly
25.0 | Boxoffice.com
25.0 | LA Times
Meanwhile, the reviews continued to come in. Overall, the critic’s rating was dropping but not precipitously. The complaints from the top critics were by far the most strident:
New Yorker’s David Denby: “A mess.”282
Washington Posts’s Ann Hornaday (March 8) “Gets off to such an incoherent start that it takes almost the entire, interminable two-hour-plus running time to catch up.”283
Newark Star-Ledger’s Stephen Whitty: “Whenever the fighting stops and two people have to stand and talk, all the air goes out of everything. Suddenly, it feels as if we’re in an empty theater, watching a dusty old sword-and-sandal epic.”284
And:
LA Times Betsy Sharkey: “Yep, everything you’re heard is true. The movies is a big-budget bomb. The visuals are great, but the storytelling is stale and the leads are lost.”285
Reading the reviews, I was struck by how many of the naysayers made reference, as the LA Times did, to the narrative of failure that had predicted the film would be an overpriced bomb -- it was as if there was a merging of popular chatter and serious criticism.
What difference did the chatter about the budget make to a reviewer?
Theoretically none.
But there it was, again and again on the page, references that seemed to support the conclusion that the reviews were being influenced by the toxic anti-hype that had been circulating.
Even so, it was by no means all complaints. In fact if anything was becoming apparent, it was that John Carter was polarizing -- critics had strong feelings in both directions.
Mania.com’s Rob Vaux: “John Carter is an absolute romp.”286
Nerdist’s Luke Y. Thompson: “John Carter is a science-fiction epic worth cheering, one where however much they spent, it all went to throw amazingly huge and awesome things onscreen in the service of a story that some are actually calling too complicated.”287
St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Mathew DeKinder: “This is an old-fashioned movie told with cutting-edge technology and while it’s easy to be cynical...it is refreshing to see a movie that approaches its subject with an authentic, wide-eyed sense of wonder.”288
Film School Rejects’ Robert Levin: “Visionary and philosophical, with the sort of complex allusions to death, immortality, and the destruction of civilizations that you don’t expect from a $250M film.”289
As March 8 ended, I sat with my laptop, watching for a hoped-for surge in positive internet chatter that never came. If there was going to be a box office miracle the next day, it wasn’t going to come from social media users.
I was pretty sure there wasn’t going to be a miracle.
Opening Day
Almost 100 years to the day after Under the Moons of Mars had first appeared in All-Story magazine, the long delayed journey of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original classic made its way to cinema screens in the United States and 58 countries around the world.
For Andrew Stanton, the final weeks of the promotional campaign had been alternately exhilarating and exhausting. There had been the press junkets in mid February in Arizona and New York, followed by the premiere of the movie on February 21. After a few quick days at home in Mill Valley north of San Francisco, he returned to Los Angeles on February 25 for Oscar weekend. He attended the Oscars on February 26, then on the 27th visited the set of Star Trek 2 before attending the Hero Complex John Carter Screening in Burbank and doing a Q and A there. On February 28th he gave a TED talk, about which he remarked : “I’ve never rehearsed so much for so little face time since my wedding.” Then it was off to London for more press and the London premiere, then Moscow for more press and a premiere. Exhausted, he flew back to Mill Valley on the sixth and settled in to wait, watch, and see what happened.
He was buoyed by a steady stream of effusively favorable reviews that friends and Twitter followers sent him. But he couldn’t help but be aware of the negative reviews that were out there too, and he knew that John Carter was not going to be the kind of love fest with critics that Finding Nemo and Wall-E had had been.
‘Carter, as he referred to the movie, was different than those two. Some people just didn’t get it.
Clearly there were those -- critics and fans alike, who deeply loved the movie. The word of mouth screenings over the last two weeks prior to release had already generated fans who had seen the film 2 or more times prior to opening day and were shouting about it on the internet in every way they could. Stanton’s Twitter feed was filled with tweets from fans and critics which Stanton retweeted:290
@gpaulwills: “Loved John Carter! Fantastic job! I’ll be sharing the film with my kids someday. Felt like a 10 year old again!”
@fisherbaird: Spread the word, people of Earth. Just saw John Carter and it's crazy goddamn good. Enter-effing-taining from beginning to end.
@damonlindelof: Why is everyone so surprised JOHN CARTER is totally awesome? I went with high expectations and they were SURPASSED. Epic. Fun. SEE IT.
@halhickel: just got out of the most gloriously realized pulp science fantasy I've ever seen. And a hell of a good time to boot. JCM!
@solat78: just watched JC. My dad would have loved it! Thx u 4 making the movie he always wanted. Miss u dad!
@dannytrs: Just saw JC. Thanks to you we can no longer say "They don't make 'em like they used to, anymore
@jfangsky: Saw JOHN CARTER. Mind blown. See it on the big screen. Then see it again. In awe of @andrewstanton 's craftsmanship.
Then the day finally came.
Would the experts be right -- John Carter would tank?
Or would there be a surprise?
Friday, March 9, 2012
The day began at midnight and the reports from midnight screenings weren’t good. As usual Nikki Finke in full-on “toldja” mode at Deadline.com led the way reporting the box office demise:291
FRIDAY 8:30 AM: The studio is expecting only $24M-$30M despite a whopping budget of $250M, and this start of $500K midnights is weak considering that cost. Rival studios tell me that foreign numbers are starting out soft as well. Disney is uncharacteristically mum despite planning a gigantic worldwide day-and-date push for John Carter with all the frills no matter how dismal its prospects look. All in, this could mean a $100M writeoff for the Walt Disney Co. Box office for this bomb is making rival studios just a little too gleeful considering that probably 1,000 of their Hollywood brethren were gainfully employed during a dismal economy.
In the case of John Carter, the weak midnight showing figure could only presage that the day would not hold a big favorable surprise for the film. Meanwhile, Finke continued her updates:
UPDATE 8:50 AM: Disney just told me that John Carter has made $13M so far overseas with the biggest news from 3D sci-fi-loving Russia where the movie had the highest opening day in history with $6.5M. The studio is reporting solid starts in Asian markets. But rival studios are w
arning me of soft starts in Europe.
2ND UPDATE, 9:15 AM: Disney wants me to know that The Avengers trailer that broke records online last week is going up on John Carter in theaters this weekend. It’s a blatant attempt to use the enormous anticipation for the Marvel movie to pump up what box office predictions say are the sagging fortunes of Finding Nemo and Wall-E director Andrew Stanton’s live action turkey. John Carter‘s biggest problems, aside from the fact that no women want to see it, is its inability to attract young males — which is Marvel’s sweet spot.
4TH UPDATE, FRIDAY 5:30 PM: Nothing changed. My sources are still predicting box office results for Walt Disney Studios’ John Carter (playing in 3,749 theaters) around $9.5M to $11M today and $27.5M to $33M for the weekend. For a smaller budget film, that would be considered a good opening — but not one costing $250+M.
For most of professional Hollywood, by the end of the day on Friday the jury on John Carter had come in. Deadline and Box Office Mojo were reporting a Friday gross of $9.8M which projected to a weekend total in the $25-30M range that had been widely predicted. That was enough to spell doom for the film, even if it achieved the good (but not spectacular) word of mouth that early audience tracking showed it could expect.
Was there anything left to hope for?
Would there be a word of mouth miracle?
On Saturday, John Carter received an unexpected bump up to $12M that even Nikki Finke had to acknowledge reflected better than expected word of mouth. In her Sunday morning update she wrote:292
John Carter finished a feeble #2 considering its whopping $250+M cost. Friday’s domestic box office numbers for director Andrew Stanton’s actioner came in even weaker than predicted but rival studios tell me the loincloth epic experienced an unexpected double-digit bounce on Saturday. Clearly word of mouth, like the ‘B+’ CinemaScore from audiences, is helping although reviews were decidedly mixed.
To summarize: this flop is the result of a studio trying to indulge Pixar… Of an arrogant director who ignored everybody’s warnings that he was making a film too faithful to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first novel in the Barsoom series A Princess of Mars… Of the failure of Dick Cook, and Rich Ross, and Bob Iger to rein in Stanton’s excessive ego or pull the plug on the movie’s bloated budget … Of really rotten marketing that failed to explain the significance or scope of the film’s Civil War-to-Mars story and character arcs and instead made the 3D movie look way as generic as its eventual title… Disagree all you want, but Hollywood is telling me that competent marketing could have drawn in women with the love story, or attracted younger males who weren’t fanboys of the source material. Instead the campaign was as rigid and confusing as the movie itself, not to mention that ’Before Star Wars, Before Avatar‘ tag line should have come at the start and not at the finish.
Although the US media was obsessed with the domestic gross, dollars were dollars and the foreign numbers were far from a disaster. While John Carter grossed only $30.2M in the US, it took in $70.6M internationally in 58 countries representing 80% of the international market. As weak as the US opening was, it was abundantly clear that JC was no “Mars Needs Moms,” which took in $39M total worldwide for its entire run.
The Hollywood Reporter acknowledged as much, first reporting that the film had come nowhere near the type of box office that it needed, given its budget, but adding:293
The good news for Disney was that John Carter received a B+ CinemaScore and was up 25 percent on Saturday, reflecting positive buzz. The film played best to older fanboys, but needed an equally strong showing from younger males. On Saturday, families turned out as well, making up 20 percent of the audience.
Nearly 60 percent of the audience was over the age of 25, according to exit polls conducted by Disney, while 64 percent of those buying tickets were males....
Internationally, John Carter--headlining Taylor Kitsch--opened particularly strong in Russia, grossing roughly $17 million, and did good business in Asia as well. It's European performance was mixed.
Still, no matter what the window-dressing, the reality was that John Carter was now officially labeled a mega-flop.
On Sunday, the same day that most casual box office watchers see the first weekend results, The New York Times’ published a lengthy article by Brooks Barnes under a headline that reconfirmed and amplified the flop narrative: “Ishtar Lands on Mars.” Other reports followed the same tone, and the buzzards that had been circling for weeks began to feast.
For those rooting for the film, it seemed that the preordained flop narrative had played a role in the film’s demise.
From Mill Valley, Stanton tweeted bleakly: “Thanks to everyone who ignored the schadenfreude and went to ‘Carter this weekend. You’re the best.”294
About the same time Stanton tweeted about Schadenfreude, I was writing and posting an article about it: “John Carter and Big Budget Schadenfreude, or How $100M Global Gross in the first 3 days gets Labeled an Iconic Hollywood Flop.”295
The article attempted, as best I could, to make sense of the psychology behind the gleeful reporting of the demise of the film. Stanton had given heart and soul and five years of his life to the movie; others had worked on it for years and it was clearly a labor of intense, passionate film-making. Why were people so “thrilled and sickened” to watch something like this happen?
I found a quote from James Shenton which seemed to capture some of it:296
There’s something oddly satisfying about seeing a big-budget movie flop. Whenever we hear about these ambitious, special effects-laden extravaganzas going down in flames we get an odd feeling of schadenfreude. But why is this? Does it stem from the fact that we feel manipulated, almost exploited, by the movie industry? Perhaps. After all, movie studios make a lot of coin from tweaking our emotions, be it through adrenaline-filled action films or mawkishly tear-jerking weepies. Perhaps the best reason for our guilty pleasure at seeing a big-budget movie flop is the fact that we feel like we won a battle. We caught Hollywood trying to pull a fast one by releasing a bad movie and trying to hype it anyway — and we weren’t fooled. Gotcha. Better luck next time.
Digging deeper, I found a 2007 study by Norman T. Feather entitled: “Envy, Resentment, Schadenfreude, and Sympathy: Reactions to Deserved and Undeserved Achievement and Failure.”297 That study too seemed to suggest that the explosion of glee and lack of empathy related to a sense that justice is achieved by the failure. I wrote:
The answer, it would seem comes back to the notion that schadenfreude erupts when there is a felt perception that the failure restores balance, that a form of justice is achieved by the failure. In this case, Disney is seen as being properly rewarded for foolishly investing mega-dollars in a questionable property, and then shoving the resultant product down the throats of unwilling potential audience goers with mind-numbing, relentlessly obtuse marketing. To the Schadenfreudist, an epic fail is the only just reward for such epic hubris, and thus the narrative is pre-determined and nothing short of an outright “win” at the box office will derail that narrative.
Still, reflections about Schadenfreude aside, the facts were the facts, and John Carter was not going to be the recipient of a box office miracle. Opening weekend had come and gone, and even with $100M in worldwide revenues, the verdict was “flop.” As far as the mainstream was concerned, it was game over for John Carter.
But elsewhere, outside the box office obsessed circles in journalism, something was stirring.
John Carter needed 20 million viewers worldwide to see the film on opening weekend, and that hadn’t happened. But 10 million had seen the film. And for some of those, the Burroughs-Stanton collaboration was working a certain magic.
Fans were starting to speak.
The Fans Get Organized
Edgar Rice Burroughs had always forged an emotional connection with readers who responded to his unique blend of wish-fulfillment adventure and imaginative discovery. His influence on creative minds from Bradbury to Cameron is well documented. H
e was the most read author on the planet during the first half of the 20th century, and his creation Tarzan is arguably the single best known literary character ever created. In the sixties, another generation -- including Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and George Lucas -- had discovered Burroughs, and been profoundly influenced by him.
Now, at last, Burroughs’ Martian universe had been portrayed on cinema screens worldwide and, even if box office results were far below what was needed for the business enterprise of John Carter to be labeled a success -- there was, now, a substantial body of filmgoers numbering in the millions who had just been introduced to Burroughs universe via Stanton’s interpretation of it, and who liked what they saw.
Precisely because the marketing had not prepared them for what to truly expect from the film, many were caught by surprise at what they discovered onscreen. These newly minted John Carter fans went on Facebook and Twitter, blogs and message boards, and shared what they had experienced:298
Debbie Banway: I knew nothing of Burroughs before seeing the film, and I had doubts based on the trailers I had seen.....I loved the story. The themes of a reluctant hero haunted by tragedy, a stranger in a strange land with new abilities, and trying to figure just where in the world he was. As the movie progressed I saw loyalty, friendship, honor, and doing the right thing for the right reasons. And the best was yet to come because there was an interplanetary love story that made me swoon. It was unabashedly romantic and such a treat.......
Khanada Taylor: I loved John Carter and I’m beyond anxious to see it again, and again! It is one of those films that you’ll hunger for seeing more than once......You really hate when it ends and you don’t want to leave those worlds......I think it’s a film that needs more than one view to really grasp, since it’s so different from anything else...... I fall to my knees and raise my arms to the red planet, begging to go back…