From ew, After its underwhelming $30.2 million opening two weeks ago, things weren’t looking too hot for Disney’s Mars-set adventure film John Carter, which reportedly cost $250 million to produce and an additional $100 million to market.
But there was still some hope that the sci-fi/Western hybrid, which earned an encouraging “B+” rating from CinemaScore audiences, would sport box-office legs as sturdy as its protagonist’s. That wasn’t the case, as John Carter plummeted 55 percent last weekend. Consequently, Disney released a statement today announcing that the studio expects to take a write-down of $200 million as a result of the expensive flop.
“In light of the theatrical performance of John Carter ($184 million global box office), we expect the film to generate an operating loss of approximately $200 million during our second fiscal quarter ending March 31,” Disney said in a statement. “As a result, our current expectation is that the Studio segment will have an operating loss of between $80 and $120 million for the second quarter.”
Since studios split box-office grosses with theater owners, John Carter reportedly needs to earn at least $600 million worldwide just to break even — and that’s clearly not going to happen. It’ll join such other recent Disney misfires as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Mars Needs Moms (another Mars-set bomb that just happened to be released almost exactly one year prior to John Carter).
Understandably, Disney was quick to point out its promising slate of upcoming movies. “As we look forward to the second half of the year, we are excited about the upcoming releases of The Avengers and Brave, which we believe have tremendous potential to drive value for the Studio and the rest of the company,” concludes the studio’s statement. While there’s no question that John Carter will negatively affect Disney’s bottom line, the studio will almost certainly bounce back this summer. For one thing, neither The Avengers nor Brave takes place on Mars.
4 comments:
So, so sad.
I'm not sure how long I've been a fan of the John Carter books, but the first one I read was The Master Mind of Mars (one of the best titles of anything ever). The title winked at me from an original 1928 edition that my father had on the living room bookshelf. I was probably between 11 and 14 when I picked it up, and I was hooked from the get go.
It took a hundred damn years before someone managed to make a moving picture out of it, and now nobody will ever touch it again.
My thoughts exactly, Octo.
I've been trying to figure out how they could have screwed this up so completely. It seems mostly a story about bloated budgets and poor marketing (the movie is getting mediocre but certainly not awful reviews).
It's like Disney treated the whole project like some easy LOTR cash cow franchise, when in fact they were adapting an obscure pulp adventure. I'm not even sure these books are currently in print; it's hard to figure how they thought spending $350 million making one movie was a good idea.
The marketing was terrible. The name "John Carter" alone doesn't exactly evoke excitement (apparently they determined that movies with the word "Mars" in the title bomb) and the early trailers were too cryptic to capture curiosity. The Super Bowl ad was terrible. Like Waterworld, critics seemed to want this film to fail and there were tons of unfair bad press for months before leading up to its release. I'm sure the film is fun.
Yep, the Waterworld analogy is spot on, JPX.
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