LA Times: How did Battleship escape the John Carter flop furor?
If there is a truism in Hollywood when it comes to the media, it’s that people in the industry never think you’re nasty, mean or vicious enough when writing about someone else’s movie. It’s a business, after all, where people root just as hard to see their friends fail as their enemies.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear from so many studio execs, producers and agents this week, all wondering the same thing: Why hasn’t the entertainment press been giving “Battleship” just as big a whipping as it gave “John Carter” a couple of months ago? After all, both films cost more than $200 million to make, an additional $100 million to market and, despite OK performances overseas, were pretty much dead on arrival in the United States.
Their overall numbers aren’t all that different. Disney’s “John Carter” did a paltry $72 million in the United States and an additional $210 million overseas; “Universal’s “Battleship” is on track to do even less in America than “John Carter” while so far making $232 million overseas. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Universal could lose $150 million on “Battleship,” while Disney took a $200-million write-down on “John Carter.”
Those are both huge bites out of a rotten apple, yet while “John Carter” got a noisy, prolonged thrashing from the showbiz media, “Battleship” has largely escaped scrutiny, except for a predictable round of opening weekend obituaries. (If I had a dollar for every headline that went “ ‘Avengers’ sinks ‘Battleship,’” I could probably finance a couple of movies myself.)
13 comments
Bob Page wrote
I completely agree — I think the whole “boys won’t go” thing was a mistake and that mistake is owned by Stanton ….. he is the one who came to that conclusion. And if you just use the “Harry Potter” naming strategy and go: “John Carter and the Princess of Mars” ……it further solves any issue with that. But I think the trailer and visuals would completely get rid of the “boys won’t go” problem …….. and then you’d have gotten plenty of girls/women interested.
By the way, on IMDB, the ratings breakdown shows that in every age group except 1, women rate the film higher than men. Women tend to be in the 7.2 range, men in the 6.8. I’m just sayin’……..
Bob and Henreid, those are STELLAR comments. Thank you for sharing those thoughts. It’s comforting to know that if we don’t get Stanton’s sequels, there is a path for a future Barsoom film. I guess even if we DO get his sequels, this property will probably get a reboot as well, further down the road.
I think that the title—A Princess of Mars—was nixed because of the dismal tv movie with the name. Everything about that production was horrific…really made me gag.
Guys, the title is ‘Disney John Carter’, and that’s not my distinction.
Look at the way the logo is presented on everything. Read L-R, Top to Bottom, the title is literally ‘Disney John Carter’.
And it’s a perfectly accurate one for the film.
The title change was foolish from a marketing perspective, sure, but it was a blessing in disguise now that we all know how little the film resembles the novel.
Thankfully, the title change means that someday a faithful work of cinema about the advent of Captain Carter on Barsoom still has both ‘John Carter of Mars’ and ‘A Princess of Mars’ to choose from. The only people who remember this film will be A) ERB fans who will see another version regardless, and B) those who liked this film enough to go back and read the books, who then learned how amazing a more heroic, bloodier version could be. This film was able to inspire a handful of new fans, and less able to negatively affect the Burroughs legacy by being ‘Disney John Carter’, and that is only a good thing.
As for the Battleship thing, this shouldn’t surprise anyone… sometimes being the 1st of two giant Kitsch failures in the short span of months is just bad luck.
The more I think about it, and Michael and MCR going back and forth is stimulating this, why the bloody hell didn’t they just use the real title of the book, “A Princess of Mars”. Or, if you are trying for a franchise, John Carter and the Princess of Mars. Branding. Then JC and the Gods of Mars, JC Warlord of Mars.
I know the studio logic (?), Oh, if it says princess no boys will come, if it says Mars no girls will come. How they resolved this is so counter intuitive that you have to laugh, cry or be angry. Disney prides it’s self on their Princess characters, and here they had strong, intelligent Princess character and a good love story and they decided that this had to be a “boys” picture and really totally ignored Dejah and the love story angle in all their marketing. The irony is that this movie actually plays as well, if not better, to women than men. My wife does not care for these types of movies generally but she liked this one alot, because of the Dejah character and the womanly situations she was faced with. Struggling to be taken seriously as a scientist, told by her father she has to marry a man she loathes, falls in love with another man who is still getting over his wife’s fate, and then when she makes the sacrifice to save her City, the groom is actually planning on killing her.
The stupidity is that “A Princess of Mars” actually might have brought both sides IN, not turned them off. Princess would have attracted the girls and Mars would have enticed the guys. Too much over thinking and just another example of Disney not knowing what they actually had with this film.
Dotar Sojat wrote:
“If you want to equate that with me saying that two people with no particular axe to grind observed Stanton coming back from a meeting with Ross saying “they’re changing the title to John Carter”……okay, fine.”
Yeah I do because in both cases they’re anonymous sources. I don’t know what they hope to gain from their statements or what their motives are so why should I believe either side? I don’t believe the Vulture Marketing Mole-because clearly Ross and Carney failed in their jobs just as much as Stanton did-nor do I believe these two people because I don’t know them or how reliable they are or where they sit in the Disney hierarchy. The only person on record concerning the changing of the title of this film is Andrew Stanton and at first it was his idea and then suddenly-especially after several articles came out noting what a terrible idea the name change was-and then suddenly it’s Carney’s fault? There’s more there than just he wasn’t happy about it but was playing Mr. Nice Guy. And if that makes him the “villain” of this whole story well so be it. After all Ross and Carney-as bad as they were-didn’t write a cliche riddled script that had zero respect or influence from the source material he claimed to be a fan of (a claim that has become more obviously false as Stanton himself has contradicted himself in a lot of interviews), blow the film’s budget up in some sort of Kubrickian attempt at perfection, attempt to use a process untried outside of cartoons or pretend that no one had ever read the books or if they did they were ancient and wouldn’t care how badly he botched (sorry mucked) with it. Like most villains he thought he was invincible and was the “hero” of his own story. Sadly he was his own worst enemy here and this film was the result.
MCR, the Vulture.com article kept quoting a “marketing mole” who was serving up self-serving descriptions of Stanton running riot over the head of marketing. If you want to equate that with me saying that two people with no particular axe to grind observed Stanton coming back from a meeting with Ross saying “they’re changing the title to John Carter”……okay, fine. Anyway, you’ve got Stanton fully pegged as the villain and nothing I say is ever going to change that. Meanwhile, I’m not trying to prove a theory, I’m just trying to understand what happened. I’m very satisfied, after having actually spent some time and energy researching it and interviewing people with direct access to the information, that the news about the title change was delivered to Stanton by Ross who cited focus group testing done by Carney. Stanton acquiesced without much of a fight, but wasn’t in any way a proponent of this change.
Dotar Sojat wrote:
“Well, this is one time where I have actual bonafide “inside information” which is this: Stanton first learned of the title change from Rich Ross at a meeting in April 2011 and when he came back to the set at Playa Vista where they were doing reshoots at the time, he made it clear that he didn’t like it but had acquiesced. Two different people who heard it from him at the time confirm it.”
Yes but wasn’t there also “bonafide” insiders who claimed Stanton ran riot and overruled everything the marketing people did? I mean everyone else complained about them in those Vulture and Hollywood Reporter articles as being self serving and supporting Ross, Carney, etc so I have to wonder about these “two different people” who confirmed the name change. Unless they want to go on the record with their names and positions (about as likely as THR or Vulture’s sources) I guess I’m going to remain skeptical. Stanton’s come across to much as an egotist for me to believe he would bend over to suit Ross or Disney about anything, much less changing the title. Otherwise why did Stanton come up with such BS excuses for the change? Or kept changing the reason?
MCR wrote:
Well, this is one time where I have actual bonafide “inside information” which is this: Stanton first learned of the title change from Rich Ross at a meeting in April 2011 and when he came back to the set at Playa Vista where they were doing reshoots at the time, he made it clear that he didn’t like it but had acquiesced. Two different people who heard it from him at the time confirm it.
I know there were some interviews that summer where he didn’t own up to having not liked it but it seems he was just toeing the company line, as a good director should, rather than admitting to dissent between the director and the studios. His comments in this article, which came–interestingly enough–on the same day that he started tweeting about the fan trailer and otherwise letting a little daylight open up between him and the studio. http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1679692/john-carter-mars-title-change.jhtml
“The film was also hurt by the fact that Disney, whose top cadre of executives is about as open with the press as the rulers of North Korea”…
BWWWWAaaaHAHAHAaaHaAhahAHaHahahaaaa!!! Love it! I don’t even know where to start…
Stanton claimed that he changed the title until Carney was fired/resigned and then decided to shift the blame to her and the marketing people. Personally I don’t buy it because Stanton had claimed that Disney feared him and he admitted to being a pain to the marketing over the trailer, why would he suddenly agree to change the title. I just think he changed it to further remove it from any reference to ERB. After all this wasn’t Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars, this was Andrew Stanton’s John Carter AKA Mopey Carter and the Shape Shifting Therns of Doom.
As for the article I don’t understand Hollywood mathematics anyway. I mean Paramount once claimed Forrest Gump never made a profit so go figure.
And now the blaming of the “get-rid-of-of-Mars” title goes to Carney alone? I thought it was an Andrew Stanton decision, based on his interviews.
That and the shifting budget, who’s to believe??
“didn’t we just write that story already?”
I find that sentence revolting, especially coming from a professional journalist (even unnamed), because the movies are not the same. Battleship has not been sabotaged by its marketing department, the ads were effective, and there was cross-promotion involved. Same thing for Dark Shadows. Now the movies were given all opportunities to be succesfull on their own merits, that was not the case with John Carter.
That’s not the same story, at all.