John Carter (film)

In 1881, Edgar Rice Burroughs arrives at the estate of his recently deceased uncle, John Carter, a former American Civil War Confederate Army captain who died suddenly. Per Carter's instructions, the body is put in a tomb that can be unlocked only from the inside. His attorney gives Carter's personal journal to Burroughs to whom Carter bequeathed his fortune. In a flashback to 1868 in the Arizona Territory, Union Colonel Powell arrests Carter with hopes that Carter will help in fighting local Apache. Carter escapes his holding cell, but fails to get far with U.S. cavalry soldiers in close pursuit. After a run-in with a band of Apaches, Carter and a wounded Powell are chased until they hide in a cave that turns out to be filled with gold. A Thern appears in the cave at that moment and, surprised by the two men, attacks them with a knife; Carter kills him but accidentally activates the Thern's powerful medallion and is unwittingly transported to a ruined and dying planet, Barsoom, known to Carter as Mars. Because of his different bone density and the planet's lower gravity, Carter is able to jump high and perform feats of incredible strength. He is captured by the Tharks, a nomadic tribe of Green Martians and their Jeddak, Tars Tarkas. Elsewhere on Barsoom, the Red Martian cities of Helium and Zodanga have been at war for a thousand years. Sab Than, Jeddak of Zodanga, armed with a special weapon obtained from the Thern leader Matai Shang, proposes a cease-fire and an end to the war by marrying the Princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris. The Princess escapes and is rescued by Carter. Carter, Dejah, and Tarkas's daughter, Sola, reach a spot in a sacred river to find a way for Carter to get back to Earth. They discover that the medallions are powered by a "ninth ray" that is also the source of Sab Than's weapon. They are then attacked by a vicious race called the Warhoon under the direction of Shang. Carter and Dejah are taken back to Zodanga. A demoralized Dejah grudgingly agrees to marry Sab Than and gives Carter instructions on how to use the medallion to return to Earth. Carter decides to stay but is captured by Shang, who explains to him the purpose of Therns and how they manipulate the civilizations of different worlds to their doom, feeding off the planet's resources in the process, and intend to do the same thing with Barsoom by choosing Sab Than to rule the planet. Carter escapes and returns to the Tharks with Sola to request their help. There they discover a ruthless brute, Tal Hajus, has overthrown Tarkas. Carter and an injured Tarkas battle with two enormous Great White-Apes in an arena before Carter kills Hajus, thereby becoming the leader of the Tharks. The Thark army storms Zodanga, but it is empty; realizing their army is waiting outside Helium, Carter and the Tharks commandeer the Zodangan airships and fly to Helium. Carter defeats the Zodangan army, while Sab Than is killed and Shang is forced to escape. Carter becomes prince of Helium by marrying Dejah. On their first night, Carter decides to stay on Mars and throws away his medallion. Seizing the opportunity, Shang briefly reappears and gives Carter another challenge by sending him back to Earth. Carter embarks on a long quest to find one of the Therns' medallions on Earth; after several years he appears to die suddenly and asks for unusual funeral arrangements — consistent with his having found a medallion, since his return to Mars would leave his Earth body in a coma-like state, and makes Burroughs his protector. Back in the present, Burroughs runs back to Carter's tomb and uses clues to open it. Just as he does so, a Thern appears and raises a weapon before Carter appears and shoots the Thern dead. He reveals that he had never found another medallion; instead, he devised a scheme to lure a Thern from hiding, thus winning Shang's challenge. Carter then uses the dead Thern's medallion to return to Barsoom. ==Cast==

• Taylor Kitsch as John Carter, a Confederate army captain who is transported to Mars. • Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Helium. • Samantha Morton as Sola, a Thark who works with John Carter. • Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas, the Jeddak of the Tharks and Sola's father. • Thomas Haden Church as Tal Hajus, a vicious Thark who dislikes John Carter and Tars Tarkas. • Mark Strong as Matai Shang, the Hekkador of the Therns. • Ciarán Hinds as Tardos Mors, the Jeddak of Helium and Dejah Thoris' father. • Dominic West as Sab Than, the Jeddak of Zodanga. • James Purefoy as Kantos Kan, the Odwar of the ship Xavarian. • Bryan Cranston as Colonel Powell, a Union colonel who wants John to help his U.S. cavalry soldiers against the Apache. He is loosely based on James K. Powell from the book. • Daryl Sabara as Ned, John Carter's nephew. • Polly Walker as Sarkoja, a merciless Thark who hates Sola. • David Schwimmer as a young Thark Warrior, a Thark who informs Tars Tarkas that 18 of the Thark eggs did not hatch. • Jon Favreau as the Thark bookmaker, a Thark who collects the bets on any conflict. • Don Stark as Dix, a shopkeeper at an Arizona town where John Carter stops. • Nicholas Woodeson as Dalton, John Carter's executor who summons Edgar. • Art Malik as a Zodangan General. ==Development==

Origins '' by Burroughs, McClurg. The film is largely based on A Princess of Mars (1912), the first in a series of 11 Burroughs novels to feature the interplanetary hero John Carter (and in later volumes the adventures of his children with Dejah Thoris). The story was originally serialized in six monthly installments (from February through to July 1912) in the pulp magazine The All-Story; those chapters, originally titled "Under the Moons of Mars", were then collected as a novel and published in hardcover five years later from A. C. McClurg. Bob Clampett involvement In 1931, director Bob Clampett approached Edgar Rice Burroughs with the idea of adapting A Princess of Mars into a feature-length animated film. Burroughs responded enthusiastically, recognizing that a regular live-action feature would face various limitations to adapt accurately, so he advised Clampett to write an original animated adventure for John Carter. Working with Burroughs' son John Coleman Burroughs in 1935, Clampett used rotoscope and other hand-drawn techniques to capture the action, tracing the motions of an athlete who performed John Carter's powerful movements in the reduced Martian gravity, and designed the green-skinned, 4-armed Tharks to give them a believable appearance. He then produced footage of them riding their eight-legged Thoats at a gallop, which had all of their eight legs moving in coordinated motion; he also produced footage of a fleet of rocketships emerging from a Martian volcano. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was originally set to release the cartoons, and the studio heads were enthusiastic about the series. The test footage, produced by 1936, received negative reactions from film exhibitors across the U.S., especially in small towns; many gave their opinion that the concept of an Earthman on Mars was just too outlandish an idea for midwestern American audiences to accept. The series was not given the go-ahead, and Clampett was instead encouraged to produce an animated Tarzan series, an offer that he later declined. Clampett recognized the irony in MGM's decision, as the Flash Gordon movie serial, released in the same year by Universal Studios, was highly successful. He speculated that MGM believed that serials were played only to children during Saturday matinees, whereas the John Carter tales were intended to be seen by adults during the evening. The footage that Clampett produced was believed lost for many years, until Burroughs' grandson, Danton Burroughs, in the early 1970s found some of the film tests in the Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. archives. Disney progression During the late 1950s, stop-motion animation effects director Ray Harryhausen expressed interest in filming the novels, but it was not until the 1980s that producers Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna bought the rights for the Walt Disney Studios via Cinergi Pictures, with a view to creating a competitor to the original Star Wars trilogy and Conan the Barbarian. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio were hired to write, while John McTiernan and Tom Cruise were approached to direct and star. The project collapsed because McTiernan realized that visual effects were not yet advanced enough to recreate Burroughs' vision of Barsoom. The project remained at Disney, and Jeffrey Katzenberg was a strong proponent of filming the novels, but the rights eventually returned to the Burroughs estate. Rodriguez had previously stirred up film industry controversy owing to his decision to credit Sin Citys artist/creator Miller as co-director on the film adaptation; as a result, Rodriguez decided to resign from the Directors Guild of America. In 2004, unable to employ a non-DGA filmmaker, Paramount assigned Kerry Conran to direct and Ehren Kruger to rewrite the John Carter script. The Australian Outback was scouted as a shooting location. Conran left the film for unknown reasons and was replaced in October 2005 by Jon Favreau. Stanton then lobbied Disney heavily for the chance to direct the film, pitching it as "Indiana Jones on Mars". The studio was initially skeptical. Stanton had never directed a live-action film before, and wanted to make the film without any major stars whose names could guarantee an audience, at least on opening weekend. The screenplay was seen as confusing and difficult to follow. However, since Stanton had overcome similar preproduction doubts to make WALL-E and Finding Nemo into hits, the studio approved him as director. Stanton noted he was effectively being "loaned" to Walt Disney Pictures because Pixar is an all-ages brand and John Carter, in his words, was "not going to be an all-ages film". By 2008, the first draft for Part One of a John Carter film trilogy was completed; the first film is based only on the first novel. Stanton and his Pixar colleague Mark Andrews wrote this draft. In April 2009 author Michael Chabon confirmed he had been hired to revise Stanton and Andrews' script. "I'm really good at structure and collaborating," Stanton explained, "but Michael is just technically, poetically, and intelligence-wise a better writer". Following the completion of WALL-E, Stanton visited the archives of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., in Tarzana, California, as part of his research. He also noted that although he had less time for pre-production than for any of his usual animated projects, the task was nevertheless relatively easy since he had read Burroughs' novels as a child and had already visualized many of their scenes. Stanton prepared for directing by losing , running a week, and vowed not to go to his trailer or even sit down except when absolutely necessary to avoid looking like "the privileged animation geek who'd cheated his way to the top". ==Production==

Casting Stanton said later he had no grand design for the cast, other than having the villains be played by British actors. "I knew that the cast was going to grow with creatures and it was going to grow with different types of races if we were to continue. And it was going to get a little more fantastical", he said. Many actors were considered for the title role. Aware that Carter's backstory as an officer in the Confederate Army might be a problem for modern audiences, Stanton envisioned the character as disillusioned and disgusted with war in general, apart from the side he fought on. "I wanted to not absolve him of that, but also not make him pro the side he was on. The best I could do was neutralize him". Taylor Kitsch quickly became his choice for the part, due to a scene in the Friday Night Lights television series—his character, angry, is left behind by the bus—that captured Stanton's vision for the character, as Kitsch's pose echoed that of Carter on one cover of the books in Stanton's collection. Dafoe also had to do dialogue in Thark, developed for the film by Paul Frommer, who had developed the Na'vi language for Avatar. He had worked before with Stanton on Finding Nemo, where he had come to like him. Dafoe found it pleasantly surprising that, given Stanton's background in animation, he refused to rely on the effects. "He really felt like he had to have the movie, so when we started these scenes, there was no 'oh, the CGI will do that' or 'they'll do that in post," he said, which kept the film character-driven. Other locations in Utah included Lake Powell and Grand, Wayne, and Kane counties. Cinematographer Dan Mindel believed that the entire movie should have been shot in the Four Corners region of the southwestern U.S., the only place on Earth he felt could convincingly pass for Mars. "A lot of the studio work that we had done was so compromised because of the choice of studio, the size of the stages, the fact that it was all inside when it should have been outside, all that kind of stuff". But Mindel also liked the flaws in that process. Older Panavision lenses have imperfections and aberrations, and "At a purely organic level, the light does unmanageable things when it hits an aberration", he said. "An unquantifiable magic happens, and I love that!" That unpredictability, and the effect on the film's texture and grain, gave Mindel images he hoped would "[feel] inherently realistic in spite of the fantastical creatures and the extensive digital-visual-effects technology behind them". For John Carter he used Panavision's Primo and C-Series anamorphic lenses and ATZ and AWZ zoom lenses, with Kodak's Vision3 500T Color Negative 5219 and 200T 5213 stock. Stanton reshot much of the movie twice, far more than was common in live action filmmaking at that time. He attributed that to his animation background. Collins believes that the reshoot was detrimental for her character. Originally filmed as a strong, independent warrior, the scenes added, such as those with her father, made her seem more vulnerable; and scenes like those in which she had slapped Carter were cut. She believes the studio wanted a softer take on Thoris and was reduced to asking Stanton every day what would work with that and just doing it. There were many effects and CGI shots to finish. Stanton recalls that "[t]here were more animated shots in what was left to do on Carter than an entire animated feature". Animating the Tharks, especially in large numbers during battle scenes, proved particularly challenging; the software had to be upgraded for it, and as one animator recalls, work scenes sometimes took three hours to open. Many of those working on the CGI were particularly appreciative of Stanton, since due to his background he had considerable expertise in the area and made himself more available than directors of such films usually are. ==Marketing==

John Carters marketing has been called "one of the worst marketing campaigns in movie history". The filmmakers believe that the decisions made in marketing the film were the primary reason for its failure. His ideas were used instead, and he ignored criticism that using a cover version of Led Zeppelin's 1975 song "Kashmir" in the trailer released in conjunction with an ad aired during that year's Super Bowl would make it seem less current to the contemporary younger audiences the film sought. Following the death of Steve Jobs, Stanton dedicated the film in his memory. Effect of other 2011 films' box office Disney reportedly grew more concerned about the film's prospects after the 2011 failure of the Lionsgate Films remake of Conan the Barbarian, which was based on a popular fantasy franchise that had been adapted into successful films in the 1980s starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Lionsgate's version had cost $90 million and starred Jason Momoa. Chabon recalls reading a Quora post by one of its screenwriters, Sean Hood, about how he dealt with the movie's failure, and for the first time worried about the possibility that John Carter could suffer the same fate. One of Disney's own recent big-budget franchise films also added to executives' anxieties about John Carter. The May 2011 release of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides had done well at the box office, becoming the third highest-grossing film domestically that year and making over a billion dollars worldwide. However, the film's budget, exceeding $400 million by some estimates, made it the most expensive film ever produced. Its profits were thus lower than a film that popular might have been expected to generate, making Disney fear the same could happen with John Carter. By the time of the reshoot four months after On Stranger Tides, it was reported that John Carter would have to make at least $700 million worldwide, more than twice its escalating production costs, to justify a sequel. Kitsch said the title was changed to reflect the character's journey, as John Carter would become "of Mars" only in the film's last few minutes. Former Disney marketing president Carney has also been blamed for suggesting the title change. Another reported explanation for the name change was that Disney had suffered a significant loss in March 2011 with Mars Needs Moms; Carney reportedly conducted a study which noted recent movies with the word "Mars" in the title had not been commercially successful. Chabon responds that all those films were poorly regarded by critics. Stanton reportedly believed there was enough awareness of the books that this would not be a problem, to which another marketing executive responded, "People don't say, 'I know what I'll be for Halloween! I'll be John Carter! Early 2012 After several weeks away from her office, Carney left at the beginning of 2012, with four years remaining on her contract, As that date approached, the usual aspects of Disney's marketing pushes for big-budget tentpole films were absent. There were no large merchandise displays in the company's online and retail stores, nor at big-box stores like Target. Nor were there prominently placed ads in the company's theme parks, or coverage on Disney-owned media such as the ABC broadcast network or Disney Channel. While that was seen as effective, some other promotions were not, such as an "Are You The Real John Carter?" contest; men who could prove that their real name was John Carter were encouraged to enter, and winners would be invited to a special fan screening. Premiere Disney scheduled the late February premiere for Regal's LA Live Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, rather than the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, which it owned and had renovated extensively. The choice of venue has been described as "odd", since Disney had held most of its premieres, particularly of big-budget franchise films, there since the renovation. In a news release announcing the premiere, Disney highlighted that the movie would be shown in 3D on a screen to an audience of 800 in three theaters, ranging from the cast and crew and company executives to critics, D23 members and winners of contests. "I don't know why it's done so badly, or that it's perceived as being the [biggest] flop in Hollywood history", West said four months later. "It's not that bad at all". He defended Stanton and the film, calling the former "a fucking genius" and noting that the reviews actually had not been very bad. West disclosed also that after production, in 2010, he had seen a marketing plan for the film that was never used, which he believed would have been much more effective than what Disney chose to do. In 2020, Screen Rants Kayleigh Donaldson reiterated the earlier arguments that Stanton's Pixar-based filmmaking process had unnecessarily increased costs, and that the film's ensuing bloated production budget made it harder to be profitable, as had been the case with Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. She noted that all but one of the 10 most expensive films ever made had been made in the last decade, and all but one of those nine had been Disney productions. "This is now the status quo for blockbuster cinema, an era of too-big-to-fail filmmaking that is almost exclusively reliant on international grosses just to break even". Of those eight Disney films, John Carter was the only one not part of an existing franchise. That large budget was necessary to faithfully and credibly replicate Burroughs's vision onscreen, but at the same time audiences were accustomed enough to expensive CGI and effects spectacles that that alone could not be expected to impress them. Donaldson also criticized the titling, noting that the early decision to not use the book title, A Princess of Mars, "raised a lot of questions over who Disney wanted to sell the movie to", implying that the studio feared that men might not be interested in a movie with "Princess" in the title, despite Disney's own experience to the contrary with its many princess movies. Stripping it down to just John Carter "robbed the movie of its identity ... as a title [it] conveyed nothing to potential audiences about the movie they were being sold". Stanton's stated reason for the latter move, that the narrative is about how John Carter becomes John Carter of Mars, also, to Donaldson, points to another problem that has beset other films adapted from series with multiple books. "In an effort to play catch-up to a franchise that spent years developing its intricately woven multiple narratives, many studios tried to do the work of three or four movies in one", she wrote. "This resulted in a lot of franchise non-starters because audiences had little interest in films that existed solely to set up a bunch of sequels for a property they didn't care about". Among these she included Artemis Fowl, Robin Hood, and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Likewise with John Carter, the realization of Barsoom onscreen "wasn't enough to sustain a movie and didn't entice enough people to invest in a trilogy that would never see the light of day". Donaldson argued that in addition to being overtaken by works influenced by it, the Carter franchise was no longer popular enough to sustain an expensive film franchise by 2012, a century after the first book was published, an issue unintentionally highlighted by the use of "Kashmir" in the trailer. There still were fans, she conceded, but "[n]ame recognition alone does not make a movie hit. Just ask the most recent Tarzan reboot for evidence of that, or Disney's own attempt to make The Lone Ranger a 21st century action favorite", referring to the studio's 2013 effort, which also failed at the box office. Hards also said his complaints about the title led to another area where the marketing failed the film: its posters. "They work, but they also highlight the biggest problem the movie has. They all scream family-friendly". Burroughs's books, by contrast, depict "a violent barbarian warrior-style ... world in which women don't wear clothes", or at least that was how they had been depicted on older covers of the books, pointing to one on which Dejah is shown in a very scanty bikini. "Martian women are strong, confident, and have no body shame. They don't need clothes. Or at least that's the premise Burroughs presents as the reality of life on Mars". The franchise was "an R-rated, Conan-style story set in space" and should have been filmed that way, although Hards allowed that might alienate early 20th-century, even though it might have seemed liberating when Burroughs wrote the books. ==Music and soundtrack==

In February 2010, Michael Giacchino revealed in an interview he would be scoring the film. A year and a half later, in his New Yorker article, Friend documents accompanying Stanton on a visit to Giacchino where they discuss the movie's score and how it relates to the narrative. Stanton had put in the scratch music, the temporary music used to show what mood he wanted the actual score to reflect, himself rather than delegating that task to an editor as is commonly done. He told the composer that he wanted the music to reflect the two distinct plans driving the plot: Carter's and the Therns'. Stanton also said he wanted the music for Carter to change in a way that reflected his slow acceptance of himself as John Carter of Mars. Stanton had used music from Perfume for the Therns; he wanted something similarly choral. With the opening voiceover and battle footage, he had put music from Syriana that sounded "dire and Middle Eastern and forlorn, like a culture clinging to its nobility". He suggested something similar to Giacchino as the "Mars theme", but advised against eventually merging it with Carter's theme. "[J]ust because you're master of the high seas doesn't mean you can't have a separate theme for the ocean". Giacchino agreed but suggested a different merger, doing the Mars theme chorally near the end of the film, to accentuate the Therns' apparently inevitable takeover of the planet, an idea Stanton eagerly accepted. Walt Disney Records released the soundtrack on March 6, 2012, three days before the film's release. ==Release==

Theatrical run John Carter was released theatrically in the United States by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. A teaser trailer for the film premiered on July 14 and was shown in 3D and 2D with showings of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2; the official trailer premiered on November 30. On February 5, 2012, an extended commercial promoting the movie aired during the Super Bowl, Home media Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment released John Carter on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download on June 5, 2012. The home media release was made available in three different physical packages: a four-disc combo pack (1 disc Blu-ray 3D, 1-disc Blu-ray, 1 DVD, and 1-disc digital copy), a two-disc combo pack (1 disc Blu-ray, 1 disc DVD), and one-disc DVD. John Carter was also made available in 3D High Definition, High Definition, and Standard Definition Digital. Additionally, the home media edition was available in an On-Demand format. The Blu-ray bonus features include Disney Second Screen functionality, "360 Degrees of John Carter", deleted scenes, and "Barsoom Bloopers". The DVD bonus features included "100 Years in the Making", and audio commentary with filmmakers. The High Definition Digital and Standard Definition Digital versions both include Disney Second Screen, "Barsoom Bloopers", and deleted scenes. The Digital 3D High Definition Digital copy does not include bonus features. In mid-June, the movie topped sales on both the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert sales chart, which tracks overall disc sales, and Nielsen's dedicated Blu-ray Disc sales chart, with the DVD release selling almost a million copies making $17 million and Blu-ray and 3-D releases selling almost as many copies making $19.2 million, for a combined total of $36.3 million in its first week alone. ==Reception==

Box office Although the film grossed nearly $300 million worldwide, it lost a considerable amount of money due to its cost. At the time of its release, Disney claimed the film's production budget was $250 million, although tax returns released in 2014 revealed its exact budget was $263.7 million after taking tax credits into account. Before the film opened, analysts predicted the film would be a huge financial failure due to its exorbitant cost combined with production and marketing costs of $350 million, with Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com, noting "John Carter's bloated budget would have required it to generate worldwide tickets sales of more than $600 million to break even ... a height reached by only 63 films in the history of moviemaking". Within two weeks of its release, Disney took a $200 million writedown on the film, ranking it among the biggest box-office bombs of all time. Domestic On March 9, 2012, John Carter opened domestically in over 3,500 theaters, taking in almost $10 million, the highest grosses of any film released that day. It was the only time period for which that would be true. The following day, The Lorax, the previous weekend's box office winner, which had lost that night to John Carter only by around $300,000, reasserted its primacy, grossing $18 million even as Disney's film improved to $12.3 million. The Lorax went on to win the weekend, with $38.8 million to John Carters $30.1 million, which still made it the highest-grossing new release that weekend, easily beating Silent House and A Thousand Words. Domestically, both The Lorax and John Carter were displaced by the next weekend's winner, the newly released 21 Jump Street, which easily outgrossed both. John Carter stayed in all its theaters, but revenues dropped by more than half from the previous weekend, to $13 million. On the film's third weekend, its theater count dropped by approximately 500 as The Hunger Games arrived in theaters with a $152.5 million opening weekend; John Carters receipts again more than halved, down to $5 million. Throughout April, grosses and theaters continued to decline. Following that year's Easter weekend, it dropped out of the box office top 10, by which point it was in fewer than 500 theaters and earning less than a million dollars. John Carter experienced a slight resurgence on the first weekend of May, coinciding with the release of Disney's other expected tentpole for early 2012, The Avengers, a Marvel film based on its popular comic franchise, when its theater count nearly doubled and grosses rose to $1.5 million, the last weekend they would reach seven figures. Disney again increased its theater count two weeks later, when Battleship, also starring Kitsch, was released. But it did not boost the grosses, which steadily declined as it left more and more theaters through the end of June. Its highest-grossing opening was in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), where it broke the all-time opening-day record ($6.5 million) and earned $16.5 million during the weekend. The film also scored the second-best opening weekend for a Disney film in China ($14.0 million). It was in first place at the box office outside North America for two consecutive weekends. John Carter grossed $73.1 million in North America and $211.1 million in other countries, for a worldwide total , of $284.1 million. It had a worldwide opening of $100.8 million. Its highest-grossing areas after North America are China ($41.5 million), Russia and the CIS ($33.4 million), and Mexico ($12.1 million). Critical response One week before the film's release, Disney removed an embargo on reviews of the film. The film holds a 52% rating at the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 239 reviews, with an average rating of 5.80/10. The consensus reads: "While John Carter looks terrific and delivers its share of pulpy thrills, it also suffers from uneven pacing and occasionally incomprehensible plotting and characterization". At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average out of 100 to critics' reviews, the film holds a score of 51 based on 43 reviews, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Derivative but charming and fun enough, Disney's mammoth scifier is both spectacular and a bit cheesy". Glenn Kenny of MSN Movies rated the film 4 out of 5 stars, saying, "By the end of the adventure, even the initially befuddling double-frame story pays off, in spades. For me, this is the first movie of its kind in a very long time that I'd willingly sit through a second or even third time". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film 2.5 out of 4 stars, commenting that the movie "is intended to foster a franchise and will probably succeed. Does John Carter get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does". Dan Jolin of Empire gave the film 3 stars out of 5, noting, "Stanton has built a fantastic world, but the action is unmemorable. Still, just about every sci-fi/fantasy/superhero adventure you ever loved is in here somewhere". Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News gave the film 3 out of 5 stars, calling the film "undeniably silly, sprawling and easy to make fun of, [but] also playful, genuinely epic and absolutely comfortable being what it is. In this genre, those are virtues as rare as a cave of gold". Conversely, Peter Debruge of Variety gave a negative review, saying, "To watch John Carter is to wonder where in this jumbled space opera one might find the intuitive sense of wonderment and awe Stanton brought to Finding Nemo and WALL-E". Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a D rating, feeling, "Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better". In a 1 of out 4 review, Peter Howell of Toronto Star said, "It looks as if Disney simply borrowed and recycled the sets of Prince of Persia and Gladiator, adding leftover props from The Phantom Menace and Cowboys and Aliens". Christy Lemire of The Boston Globe wrote that, "Except for a strong cast, a few striking visuals and some unexpected flashes of humor, John Carter is just a dreary, convoluted trudge – a soulless sprawl of computer-generated blippery converted to 3-D". Michael Philips of the Chicago Tribune rated the film 2 out of 4 stars, saying the film "isn't much – or rather, it's too much and not enough in weird, clumpy combinations – but it is a curious sort of blur". Andrew O'Herir of Salon.com called it "a profoundly flawed film, and arguably a terrible one on various levels. But if you're willing to suspend not just disbelief but also all considerations of logic and intelligence and narrative coherence, it's also a rip-roaring, fun adventure, fatefully balanced between high camp and boyish seriousness at almost every second". Mick LaSalle of San Francisco Chronicle rated the film 1 star out of 4, noting, "John Carter is a movie designed to be long, epic and in 3-D, but that's as far as the design goes. It's designed to be a product, and it's a flimsy one". A.O. Scott of The New York Times said, "John Carter tries to evoke, to reanimate, a fondly recalled universe of B-movies, pulp novels and boys' adventure magazines. But it pursues this modest goal according to blockbuster logic, which buries the easy, scrappy pleasures of the old stuff in expensive excess. A bad movie should not look this good". In the UK, the film was panned by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, gaining only 1 star out of 5 and described as a "giant, suffocating doughy feast of boredom". The film garnered 2 out of 5 stars in The Daily Telegraph, described as "a technical marvel, but is also armrest-clawingly hammy and painfully dated". BBC film critic Mark Kermode expressed his displeasure with the film commenting, "The story telling is incomprehensible, the characterisation is ludicrous, the story is two and a quarter hours long and it's a boring, boring, boring two and a quarter hours long". Accolades ==Aftermath==

Corporate The film's failure led to the resignation of Rich Ross, the head of Walt Disney Studios, even though Ross had arrived there from his earlier success at the Disney Channel with John Carter already in development. Ross theoretically could have stopped production on John Carter as he did with a planned remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or minimized the budget as he did to The Lone Ranger starring Johnny Depp. Instead, Stanton was given the production budget requested for John Carter, backed with an estimated $100 million marketing campaign that is typical for a tentpole movie but without significant merchandising or other ancillary tie-ins. In September 2014, studio president Alan Bergman was asked at a conference if Disney had been able to partially recoup its losses on The Lone Ranger and John Carter through subsequent release windows or other monetization methods, and he responded: "I'm going to answer that question honestly and tell you no, it didn't get that much better. We did lose that much money on those movies". Double Negative, the British visual effects house now known as DNEG, also saw its business adversely affected by the film's failure. According to its later head, Robyn Luckham, who worked extensively on John Carter, the goal of working on the film was to develop expertise in animating creatures, something they believed would be in demand in the near future. "[E]veryone got cold feet", he recalls. "We didn't have another big show like that for a long time. It was tough". Personal The night after the premiere, Lynn Collins says she was at another event to promote the movie, when her manager at the time told her "you're just going to have to disappear for a while" due to the mounting perception of the film's failure. She felt it was sexist that as the film's female lead she should suffer for its failure while Kitsch went on to make Battleship, another big-budget science fiction film that failed at the box office when it was released two months after John Carter. "I took a break and tried to figure out, up until then my career and my work, I really allowed it to define me", she later said. A year later she fired not just her manager but her entire representation. After the premiere, Stanton went back to New York City, where as he later told the LA Times he spent the next three weeks riding the subway, working on other scripts and reconnecting with his daughter and friends. "I had to go into true 'Lost Weekend' to just purge myself" of empty nest syndrome, he said later. He returned to Pixar, where his many longtime coworkers felt badly for him; Iger had called him shortly after the premiere, quoting from Theodore Roosevelt's "Citizenship in a Republic" speech. "It was the best thing anybody could say at that moment and especially him", Stanton recalled. "It just made me all the more loyal to him after that, whatever they needed help with". ==Cancelled sequels==

Prior to the film's release, the filmmakers reported that John Carter was intended to be the first film of a trilogy. Producers Jim Morris and Lindsey Collins began work on a sequel based on Burroughs' second novel, The Gods of Mars. However, the film's poor box office performance put plans for sequels into question. In June 2012 co-writer Mark Andrews said in an interview that he, Stanton, and Chabon were still interested in doing sequels: "As soon as somebody from Disney says, 'We want John Carter 2, we'd be right there". Despite criticism and Disney's financial disappointment with the film, lead actors Taylor Kitsch and Willem Dafoe all showed strong support, with Kitsch stating "I would do John Carter again tomorrow. I'm very proud of John Carter". In September 2012, Stanton announced that his next directorial effort would be Pixar's Finding Dory, and that the plan to film a John Carter sequel had been cancelled. Kitsch later stated he would not make another John Carter film unless Stanton returns as director. In a May 2014 interview, he added, "I still talk to Lynn Collins almost daily. Those relationships that were born won't be broken by people we never met. I miss the family. I miss Andrew Stanton. I know the second script was awesome. We had to plant a grounding, so we could really take off in the second one. The second one was even more emotionally taxing, which was awesome". Stanton tweeted both titles and logos for the sequels that would have been made with the titles being Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars. In October 2014, Disney allowed the film rights to the Barsoom novels to revert to the Burroughs estate. In November 2016, Stanton stated, "I will always mourn the fact that I didn't get to make the other two films I planned for that series". Stanton's Gods of Mars setup In 2022, on the film's 10th anniversary, Stanton shared with TheWrap how the sequel, Gods of Mars, would have begun ... with Collins reading the prologue narration as Dejah and, over a relevant montage, recounting the events of the first film. When she appeared diegetically, she would be shown telling it to an infant, Carthoris, her child by Carter. Tardos would then have come into the scene, telling Dejah to go to bed herself and he would put his grandchild to bed. When she left, Tardos would have been revealed to actually be Matai Shang, having shapeshifted to appear to be Tardos, and then after Shang kidnapping the child the opening credits would have begun. Following the credits, Stanton said, Carter would be seen in his funeral suit lying in the middle of the desert, and waking up. He would take off his jacket and start walking, as a thoat driven by a Thark slowly came in from the horizon. The driver would tell Carter he knew who he was and someone was looking for him. He would take Carter to Kantos Kan, who had been searching for Carter for a long time and was shocked to actually find him. Kan would explain to Carter "you have to get back to heal him". The audience, expecting a reunion, would then learn that some time had elapsed since the prologue. In the interim, Dejah would have disappeared as well, exploring the River Iss in hopes of finding Carter. Eventually it would have been revealed that the Therns took their child, which would have, as in the second of Burroughs' books and Beneath the Planet of the Apes, led to revelations that a technologically advanced race living beneath the surface was controlling the air and water supply to keep the planet alive. He implied he had written more, but that was as much as he was willing to reveal at that time. ==Legacy==

The film's two leads remain proud of the work they did and believe the film is better than its reputation. Kitsch, who has largely returned to television work following his two big-budget failures in 2012, told The Hollywood Reporter when 21 Bridges was released in 2019 that "I learned a ton on that movie. I honestly don't see it as a failure". He noted that fans in Europe still stopped him on the street and mentioned the movie, which he believed had also seen an uptick in viewership due to its recent availability on Netflix. Collins says it took some time for her to come to terms with the film and its effect on her career. Eventually, "[p]eople started reaching out to me and expressing to me how much the movie changed their life, how much the character inspired them and motivated them ... It's posterity forever. I will die, and people will still be seeing this movie". She came to realize that "a movie that is that polarizing is good no matter what, because that's what art is supposed to do". In 2026, Stanton commented positively on the film's reputation, "All I know is that it's found its audience and that mattered. I consider it a book that has been written. It's out there. Nobody can hide it unless it's banned. And it'll find its audience." Decennial reassessment Newby also argued that the film was better than its reputation. "What makes the box office failure so frustrating is that I don't believe this to be a case where anything could have been done differently", he wrote. "With the filmmaker, cast and technology at hand, John Carter was the best adaptation of A Princess of Mars that could have been made and seems will ever be made". He believed the film had actually improved on the book, giving its characters more depth and complexity. Conversely, the passage of time had not helped the film for Gizmodos Germain Lussier, who wrote, "I remember not hating the movie, but not particularly liking it either, and in the decade since release I've always wondered if John Carter had cult potential". Upon watching it again, he concluded it did not. "Ten years hasn't changed John Carter at all. It's still not an awful movie. There are a few really excellent things in there. But it's mostly just drawn out, uninteresting, and boring, in large part [due] to the whole thing feeling so derivative", since by 2012 aspects of the story that had been original to Burroughs's work had been reused in so many other works. Lussier also felt the "oceans of exposition between warring factions that are barely distinguishable" came at the expense of the movie's more successful action sequences, and apart from Dafoe and Morton he felt most of the Thark characters had little depth. "John Carter works, but it doesn't work well," Lussier concluded. "[T]his viewing made me realize that I doubt even 50 years will change how it feels". ==See also==