• Director
  • Andrew Stanton
• Writers
  • Andrew Stanton(screenplay by)
  • Mark Andrews(screenplay by)
  • Michael Chabon(screenplay by)
• Stars
  • Taylor Kitsch
  • Lynn Collins
  • Willem Dafoe

   

John Carter is a 2012 American science fiction action film directed by Andrew Stanton, written by Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon, and based on A Princess of Mars (1912), the first book in the Barsoom series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The film was produced by Jim Morris, Colin Wilson, and Lindsey Collins.

John Carter stars Taylor Kitsch in the title role, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Mark Strong, Ciarán Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy and Willem Dafoe. The film chronicles the first interplanetary adventure of John Carter and his attempts to mediate civil unrest amongst the warring kingdoms of Barsoom.

Several attempts to adapt the Barsoom series had been made since the 1930s by various major studios and producers. Most of these efforts, however, ultimately stalled in development hell. In the late-2000s, Walt Disney Pictures began a concentrated effort to adapt Burroughs’ works to film, after an abandoned venture by the studio in the 1980s.

The project was driven by Stanton, who had pressed Disney to renew the screen rights from the Burroughs estate. Stanton became the new film’s director in 2009. It was his live-action debut, as his previous directorial work for Disney was on the Pixar animated films Finding Nemo (2003) and WALL-E (2008).

Filming began in November 2009, with principal photography underway in January 2010, wrapping seven months later in July. Michael Giacchino, who scored many Pixar films, composed the film’s music. Like Pixar’s Brave, the film is dedicated to the memory of Steve Jobs.

John Carter was released in the United States on March 9, 2012, marking the centennial of the titular character’s first appearance. The film was presented in Disney Digital 3D, RealD 3D, and IMAX 3D formats. Upon release, John Carter received a mixed critical reception, with praise for its visuals, Giacchino’s score, and the action sequences, but criticism of the characterization and plot. The film failed at the North American box office, but set an opening-day record in Russia.

It grossed $284 million at the worldwide box office, resulting in a $200 million writedown for Disney, becoming one of the biggest box office bombs in history. With a total cost of $350 million, including an estimated production budget of $263 million, it is one of the most expensive films ever made. Due to the film’s poor box office performance, Disney cancelled plans for sequels (titled Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars), which would have completed the trilogy Stanton had planned.

The film’s failure has been blamed on its marketing campaign, which has been called “one of the worst marketing campaigns in movie history”.

Critics focus on the decision to remove the words “Princess” and “Mars” from the title out of fear of alienating young men and women, leaving prospective audiences to try and make sense of what John Carter was about from trailers and advertisements that were similarly minimally informative about either the film’s characters and plot, its place in the development of science fiction or who had made it;

The images they used also seemed derivative of works such as Star Wars, Dune and Avatar that had themselves been informed by the Barsoom stories. Other critics have argued the film was doomed from the start since those works had so thoroughly appropriated the source material as to assure that modern audiences would see John Carter as unoriginal.