John Carter - The Unluckiest IP in Entertainment History
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John Carter: The Unluckiest IP in Entertainment History
Hollywood is built upon bringing fantastic sci-fi adventures to screen. So, why can no mind on earth breathe life into this classic story?
John Carter is the biggest "what if?" in cinema, bar none. Decade after decade, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ creation continues to stumble short of glory. Just as the comic-hero renaissance begins its twilight phase, the century-old pulp-adventure serial seems to have emphatically failed to stake a claim among its contemporaries. If any film property is cursed, it's this one.
Despite a classic in the genre, inspiring the likes of Carl Sagan and countless writers, it was chronically ignored in Hollywood. Before Cowboy Bebop, Resident Evil, and Cats fans witnessed their respective Manga, game franchise, and play besmirched by half-hearted movie adaptations, there was John Carter from Mars, the patron saint of production hell. But it didn’t have to be this way. Film companies are always chasing the next epic masterpiece. The results? Mixed. That's being generous. Making a blockbuster is way harder than it looks, see Battlefield Earth. Hollywood — for all the abuse we may hurl at them — are not as risk-adverse as we think. But when they fail, they take it personally.
Against all odds, John Carter scripts managed to kick around LA executive offices for the better part of eight decades. When they pulled the trigger, the film was underwhelming. Should the Disney suits have listened to the original test audiences? It’s complicated. John Carter is now considered to be one of the biggest blunders in the annals of cinema. Hollywood is built upon bringing fantastic sci-fi adventures to screen. So, why can no mind on earth breathe life into this classic story?
Obvious Potential
Fans were trying to get this film made for a long time. The first attempt to adapt Burroughs' John Carter serialized-novel A Princess of Mars (published in 1912) started back in the 1930s. An animator at Warner Brothers created test footage for a cartoon version in his spare time. Bob Clampett harbored a lifetime love of the pulp novel and dreamed of directing a theatrical version in cartoon form, which he and Burroughs viewed as the best way to handle the fantastical science fiction creatures and setting. "I wanted to do something quite imaginative, with tongue-in-cheek humor throughout," Clampett said, going so far as creating an ambitious rotoscoped test reel.
MGM showed interest, but ultimately abandoned it due to the success of another Warner Bros.'s property authored by Burroughs, Tarzan. By their logic, it was too risky to bank on a hugely successful author that had already delivered one genre-defining crowd-pleaser. We won’t pretend to understand their thought process.
Related: John Carter Director Details Abandoned Sequel on Disney Flop's 10th Anniversary
Ray Harryhausen was the most promising shot to spark the hard-to-film fantasy to life two decades later when film rights fell into Disney’s lap, the stop-motion genius the one man in the business who could bring the necessary sci-fi effects to a live-action format. This too failed to materialize; we don't know why. Though the IP aged, the author died, and spec script after script failed, there were still serious producers like Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna (makers of Rambo and Total Recall) who were willing to take a look. But a look is all it ever got, rejecting John Carter a rite of passage for producers.
Near-Misses and Phantom Projects
Die Hard director John McTiernan’s name was thrown into the mix at in the early-90s, temporarily injecting hope of grabbing a worthy director to finally complete the problematic adaptation. Computer-generated effects reached a new level, the technical obstacles of the past long in the rearview mirror. One incarnation may have featured Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts as well, though these hopes were soon dashed by reality. Robert Zemeckis of Back to the Future fame rejected the story. This was not out of dislike for the concept, but ironically out of foreseeable negative comparisons to George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, which itself likely drew inspiration from old science fiction novels like A Princess of Mars. John Carter couldn't catch a break.
Iron Man director Jon Favreau had quit too after extensive planning, the project eventually handed off a final time, now under the guidance of director Andrew Stanton. "Stanton started to weave in elements from the later books," Favreau told Collider, intimating he would have preferred a tighter, less ambitious plot that stuck more to the first book. "I probably wouldn’t have been as ambitious. I probably would have told a smaller story." In anticipation of Favreau's (not-yet aborted) 2007 release, the low-budget studio The Asylum inadvertently created a knockoff to a film that wasn't released for another three years, just to torture John Carter fans one more time.
Related: John Carter Star Taylor Kitsch Reflects on the Failed Franchise
Why Did John Carter Fail?
Test screenings back in the 30s reacted poorly to the plot, fedora-bedecked crowds finding the whole space-princess conceit too bizarre to sit through. Bad news for Clampett, but that doesn’t mean much today. The idea of the fish out of water, transported to a strange new world, has only become more prevalent through the rise of the Isekai. A high-concept sci-fi plot is not an issue either. Nobody predicted Star Wars becoming a hit in 1977, nor a hundred other surprise hits. No sane person today dismisses pulp novels or comics anymore. Making a Joker-origin movie 30 years ago would have seemed dumb. Peruse Joaquin Phoenix's trophy case to see how that turned out. Relative obscurity? Also not insurmountable. Dune failed miserably in 1984. In 2021, the IP was revived and critically acclaimed, spawning legions of new fans who never heard of its author, Frank Herbert, the Denis Villeneuve movie earning enough to birth a sequel.
With no offense to the 2012 director nor the crew, John Carter lacked a visionary to put the pieces together. When it finally arrived in 2012, a century in the making, it quickly limped out of the limelight thanks to a disastrous debut, clueless marketing, and a head-scratchingly optimistic budget of $250 million (before inflation) that a lot of Marvel films would struggle to justify even today. The hot iron had grown frozen solid, the book long dropping out of popular consciousness through mismanagement. Critics and fans both agreed the movie was languid and forgettable, eight decades of Hollywood hopes culminating in a dud. A re-working or sequel was never pulled off. It took a century for the film to get made, and it might take another to earn a reboot or sequel, considering its run of ill-luck.
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