The year was 2012. Facebook bought Instagram, Apple launched the iPhone 5we all sang ‘Gangnam Style’, we were afraid that the world ended because of a Mayan prophecy and Disney launched its next great franchise: ‘John Carter‘. He did it with great aspirations, with the aim of ushering in a new era of science fiction (after all, it is a story with 11 much-loved novels), but it ended up being quite the opposite.
The bases weren’t even that bad. ‘John Carter‘ is an original literary work by Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of ‘Tarzan’, and has influenced great titles such as ‘Star Wars’, ‘Dune’, ‘Super Man’ or ‘Avatar’. The ingredients were there, but they didn’t work. With John Carter, Disney signed one of the biggest financial disasters in film history. That is why it is striking that they are going to try again, not with a live-action film, but with an animated series.
Context: the John Carter disaster
The story of John Carter is curious. It’s not that the movie was bad, but the desire to eat and hunger came together. On the one hand, the feature film had an excessive budget of approximately 300 million dollars, to which about 100 million had to be added in marketing. That already sets the bar very high as far as box office is concerned, so high that 284 million were not enough.
On the other hand, its director, Andrew Stanton, had just made ‘Finding Nemo’ or ‘WALL-E’ and I had no experience directing films with live actors. Filming an animated film and a live-action film is totally different in terms of filming, effects, repeating scenes, etc., which also raised the final cost.
Finally, it never hurts to remember what happened to the name. The original work is titled ‘John Carter of Mars’, and Disney, at that time, was not in the mood to go back to betting on things from Mars after the failure of ‘Mars Needs Moms‘. He chose, therefore, to leave the title in ‘John Carter’, which, together with some most confusing trailerscaused the public to not understand the film.
The production left the Mickey Mouse company a hole of about 180 million euros ($200 million). That’s more than enough for the movie to appear. in the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest box office failure in history.
‘Brave’ live returns to Mars
More than 14 years after this disaster, John Carter will have a second chance. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., the company that manages the copyright, is developing the animated series ‘John Carter, Warlord Of Mars’. This time the approach is totally different: instead of a movie for theaters, it will be a series; and instead of real action, we will bet on animation.
Although the project was initially announced in 2025, it is now that it has taken its most important step. Mark Andrews, an Oscar-winning animation specialist, has been hired as lead director and co-showrunner. Andrews already knows John Carter very well, since he was one of the screenwriters of that failed Disney film.
Mark Andrews directed alongside Brenda Chapman the Pixar film ‘Brave‘, which won the Oscar for best animated film in 2013. In ‘John Carter, Warlord Of Mars’ he will work closely with Michael Kogge, known mainly for his ‘Star Wars’ novels, who will serve as main scriptwriter and co-showrunner.
Andrews has assured that he has been passionate about the John Carter universe since he was a child, especially for its mix of science fiction and fantasy. The new series aims do justice to the scale of the original work thanks to the possibilities offered by current animation: “Animation is the perfect medium to bring Burroughs’ world to life,” he explained, justifying why he believes that the result will be very different from that of three decades ago.
This new project is not, under any circumstances, a sequel to the Disney film. The series will be based directly on the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and will rewrite the story completely independently. At the moment the voice actors, the visual style or the platform on which it will be distributed have not been revealed, nor is there a planned release date.
Via | filmstarts
Image | disney
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