US News Media Buries “John Carter” Despite $100 Million Opening Weekend

How often do you see major entertainment and news organizations falling all over themselves to pretend that a movie like “John Carter” isn’t doing well? It’s like these journalists made such a big fuss about how “John Carter” was doomed that when the movie finally opened they intentionally downplayed all good news so as to try to kill the movie.

Yeah, Hollywood Reporter, I’m talking about you — and you, TIME, and you LA Times, and so on. If you want to know what the real story is about the “John Carter” box office is you almost have to stick to Forbes.

Here on Sunday night “The Lorax” has taken in about $123 million worldwide after 2 weeks and “John Carter” has taken in about $101 million worldwide after 3 days. Is it just me, or is the American news media struggling with the math?

The domestic box office looks dismal for “John Carter” — I will not dispute that. The movie has apparently only taken in around $30 million in the United States this weekend. This was despite hundreds or thousands of very favorable comments from viewers on social media sites — and the positive comments outpaced the negative comments by a factor of about 3 to 1 (this is not scientific but I looked at multiple Websites).

In other words, most of the people who see the movie like it. In fact, many of the commenters — who don’t have millions of visitors reading their comments — LOVE “John Carter”. But apparently the lack of enthusiasm among the young men ages 20-42 has grasped the media’s attention.

The majority of the audience appears to be made up of families, teens, and adults under 50 — but the majority of the positive comments are coming from women, especially young Taylor Kitsch-loving women.

If this trend holds true I think that the male audience will eventually follow because we all know that once the guys figure out that the girls love this movie they will follow the girls. And, besides, it’s a pretty good movie.

The most condescending post-release review I saw this weekend came from Locus, whose reviewer appears to be upset that Andrew Stanton could not resist updating the 100-year-old story for today’s audience. I mean, come on — be for real. Edgar Rice Burroughs was writing for a rather unsophisticated audience 100 years ago, as compared to today’s film-viewing audience. His readers in 1912 didn’t have 100 years of science fiction evolution laying the foundations of their expectations.

Still, all this confusion is not really the sensitive news media’s fault. It’s the fault of the Disney Company for not reaching out to and engaging the science fiction fan community starting 2 years ago. Successful film franchises are built on solid audience expectations these days and Disney went out of its way to confuse the story and the audience.

For example, why did they change the movie from “John Carter of Mars” to “John Carter”? The cover story for that major screwup is that they were afraid the audience would confuse the movie with “Mars Needs Moms”. Please. The audience would not have confused anything if Disney would have just been open and informative about the movie all along.

But to add insult to stupidty, Universal Pictures scooped Disney by signing a deal with AMC Theaters to insert the Lorax character (voiced by Danny DeVito) into AMC’s pre-film warning to the audience to please keep quiet. So every showing of “John Carter” at an AMC theater is pre-ceded by an ad for “The Lorax”. In fact, “The Lorax” has been inundating movie audiences with this kind of promotion for weeks.

What did Disney do to reach out to movie audiences? Virtually nothing.

Disney’s former VP of marketing, MT Carney, was supposed to ramp up Disney’s marketing machine. Instead she resigned under suspicious circumstances, apparently taking the fall for the failed marketing before her “plan” even began rolling out. But the real problem is that Disney’s Board of Directors and CEO have lost touch with the audience. They don’t understand that you MUST engage with the audience well in advance of a film’s release to build up anticipation for it.

The field is just too competitive.

All that is now water under the Battleship. Universal can expect to do well with its Taylor Kitsch movie because now they know who his demographic is — it ain’t the 30-42yo fanboys. Expect more advertising directed at women to come from Universal for “Battleship”.

But with a $100 million opening weekend “John Carter” doesn’t have to be written off as a total failure. It remains to be seen whether Disney can follow up this weekend’s strong worldwide showing with improved domestic promotion. Or maybe they don’t need to do so at all. Maybe the worldwide box office will return Disney’s $300 million investment (Production and Promotion costs combined). Maybe Disney will make $400 million off the film and greenlight the sequels.

Meanwhile, take what you read in the US news media with a huge bag of salt. They don’t want you to know how badly they called the shot, so they are NOT going to admit that “John Carter” had a HUGE opening weekend with $100 million.

More discussion follows at SF Fandom’s John Carter Forum.

“John Carter” of Mars Turned Out Okay

I wrote a lengthy review at for “John Carter” of Mars in which I share my very positive, supportive thoughts about the film.

What I want to share here is my disgust at the apparent poison pen campaign that someone in the film industry appears to have conducted against the movie. I began to realize something was up after reading this negative article in the L.A. Times. This was the second news story in a week where I came across references to some unnamed rival studio boss who was predicting disaster for “John Carter”.

I don’t know yet if the movie flops — I hope not. Now I want to see the sequels even more than before.

But we’ve been hearing all sorts of bad press about the movie from the film industry over the past couple of weeks. Supposedly, women didn’t like the movie. Oddly enough, there were plenty of women in the theater I went to who really enjoyed it.

Supposedly no young people are interested in the movie. Again, there were plenty of kids, teenagers, and college students in the audience — and they gave the film an ovation after it was over.

I don’t know how often people in the film industry try to torpedo each other’s projects — I suppose it happens quite often — but what disgusts me is that the news media played along. Someone down low apparently knows how to press buttons with the L.A. Times and other major news organizations willing to sell their integrity by pandering to old fashioned poison pen campaigns.

You’d think professional journalists would know better, but perhaps the disdain with which science fiction and fantasy are often treated by the news media excuses this kind of nonsense in their eyes. Well, the L.A. Times has no excuse. They should know better, and I expect better of them.

Disney screwed up royally in clamping down an embargo on the movie’s production for two years. They should have engaged with the fans all along, given us access to the development of Barsoom, and fed a steady stream of information and spy reports to major fan sites.

Disney owes the Edgar Rice Burroughs fandom a huge apology. They can make it up to us, however, by greenlighting the sequels to “John Carter” and getting the advance promotion right. Andrew Stanton did a great job with the movie. He just needs to come out and engage with the fans.

I think Edgar Rice Burroughs would have been pleased with the movie.

Is Disney Doing Right by John Carter or Not?

I am so frustrated with Disney’s abysmal attempts to promote the “John Carter” of Mars movie. They have waited until virtually the last minute to release promotional posters and videos. They have barely allowed the actors to talk to the media over the past year or so, and when they do talk it’s mostly about the other films they are appearing in.

For a company that has invested $200 million in the first of what is supposed to be a 3-film run, Disney is acting like it’s setting up “John Carter” to be a huge tax writeoff. I don’t know how much Andrew Stanton is behind the decision to keep the Edgar Rice Burroughs fans locked out of the advanced publicity process but whoever made THAT decision was the wrong person for the job.

Disney has treated this movie like it’s just another assembly-line animation film. They have given no thought to building up a franchise fan base that will support the movie regardless of how good or bad it is (although as a fan of the John Carter books I would rather support a GREAT movie). You’d think that after 15 years of studios benefitting from the power of Internet fandom that Disney would have finally read the memo: REACH OUT TO THE FANS.

Now it’s probably too late. There is hardly any buzz about the movie. Sure, you can read about the posters and trailers on various entertainment blogs but those are not FAN Websites and communities. Even ScienceFiction.com is just another commercial Website (albeit one that seems to finally have some passionate leadership). Waiting for machine-like blogs to fit an occasional John Carter post into their endless spew of low quality entertainment blurbs is not a great advance promotional campaign. It’s a lazy, formulaic approach to marketing that has more failures than successes to attest to its efficacy.

At SF-Fandom we’re trying to do what we can to share news and publicity material in our Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter forum (and new member FilmGuy has done a superb job of looking for videos and posters to share in the forum). All we lack is something real from the studio in the way of substantial outreach.

The most detailed interview with Taylor Kitsch, the star of the movie, is a canned question-and-answer press kit piece that is making its rounds on entertainment Websites.

Come on, Disney! Fire your marketing department or fire them up! Get someone out there to talk with the Edgar Rice Buroughs and John Carter fan communities. Get some people to visit the general science fiction and fantasy forums and have them post updates about ALL your films on a regular basis (you know, like PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN).

Unfortunately, all the marketing departments seem to think if they just push a Facebook page they have done their jobs. Facebook doesn’t cut the mustard. There are a lot of people who don’t use Facebook despite the big numbers they claim for members. Many of those 800 million accounts are fake, abandoned, or completely passive (family-member-only access).

I’ve been waiting for this movie for a long, long time — as have millions of other Edgar Rice Burroughs readers. And here Disney is so embarrassed about the movie it changed the name from “John Carter of Mars” to “John Carter”. Rumor has it they abandoned the “of Mars” because of “Mars Needs Moms” (like anyone would confuse the two movies — PUH-lease!). I don’t care why Disney has been such a screwup on this franchise so far — I’d like to see them change their bad promotional habits, get their heads out of the Facebook propaganda, and do some real outreach.

Let the fansites do some interviews with actors.

Give some exclusive publicity material to Barsoomia and a couple of other fansites.

Run some contests to get some fans to the premier.

Sell some freaking merchandise rights.

DO SOMETHING, Disney.