Bob Iger on Star Wars Plans

16 comments

• I agree about the disconnect between the budget and the promotion. I think the issue there is Disney never thought of John Carter as a tent pole film despite the budget.

  It had none of the requirements of a tent pole film, no big stars, not a sequel or prequel to a successful franchise, not based on a currently popular book series and Andrew Stanton while a successful director is not a Spielberg or Cameron who are among the few directors whose name gets people to see their movies.

  They even moved the opening date to March when most tent poles are released in the summer or November/December (Hunger Games is a exception).

  But it had a $250 million budget largely just to keep Stanton/Pixar happy so Pixar doesn’t lose its directors/writers to other studios if they want to test the live action waters. John Carter probably should have been a $150 million dollar film like Wrath of the Titans.

• I agree with what Yancy is saying below that the loss from JC is small price to pay to focus resources on the bigger SW prize. You’d think they’d be concerned about a $250M movie investment, but Disney Co has $40B in annual revenue. This is chump change in the larger picture.

  In Iger’s $$ eyes SW and JCOM is probably the same material to him. Maybe by 2011 his confidence level in acquiring SW was high enough that he let JC fall off his radar to focus on a more lucrative franchise. SW could have more than 3 movies, more existing fans, more merchandising, more Disneyworld rides, more everything.

  Another dynamic on Iger’s pros & cons list was he knew Lucas would be retiring, where Stanton and his comments about studios being afraid of him would still be there on JC. Disney let JC die through apathy, not conspiracy.

• I don’t know how article/press placements work but doesn’t the interest of the media willing to run your press releases play a part in it. In that case comparing John Carter to Avengers or Hunger Games would not be a good comparison. Those two films along with Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit and the Final Twilight were easily the most anticipated films going into 2012 and would likely get more press than any other films. John Carter wasn’t in the same league. A better comparison would be with films like Battleship or Wrath of the Titans which was also released in March.

  The way it works is that the publicity units for major films are either on their game or not — but none of them have any problem getting the outlets that track upcoming films to release anything they put out about the film. When you study the nature of the articles that come out (they are tracked on IMDB Pro so if you have an IMDB Pro account you have a good tool for tracking) it’s transparent which ones originated with the movie’s publicity team (95%) and the few that happened organically or were written by third party bloggers/journalists.

  If you accept the fact (which is a fact — I assure you, not an opinion) that the Disney/John Carter publicity unit had the capacity to get any article picked up, then the question becomes — if John Carter was not as anticipated as The Avengers and Hunger Games, who should be “trying harder” — John Carter? Or Hunger Games/Avengers? In other words, at the point in time that I cited (Sept/Oct 2011), both Hunger Games and Avengers were tracking just fine, and John Carter was not tracking well. So who could/should take their foot off the gas pedal? John Carter? I don’t think so. What should have been happening is that within Disney, given the 250m investment and the soft tracking, special efforts to generate buzz should have been under way. Instead, it was left on cruise control and allowed to proceed as if it were, as you say, Wrath of the Titans (budget $150m). But it was a $250M investment, not $150m. (Wrath ended up at $301M global gross but to you hear anyone calling it flop of the century?)

  My book goes into this in a lot more detail. One of the relevant chapters is here:

  I think the bottom line is that if you’re going to treat the film as an “ordinary” release, then you need to make the film with an “ordinary” budget. Once you give it a “tentpole” budget, you have to back that up with a “tentpole” promotion. That’s the disconnect here. Budget was 250m, the promotion was equivalent fo what is normally done for a 150m film—and it was inartfully done to boot.

• I don’t know how article/press placements work but doesn’t the interest of the media willing to run your press releases play a part in it. In that case comparing John Carter to Avengers or Hunger Games would not be a good comparison. Those two films along with Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit and the Final Twilight were easily the most anticipated films going into 2012 and would likely get more press than any other films. John Carter wasn’t in the same league.

  A better comparison would be with films like Battleship or Wrath of the Titans which was also released in March.

  The same issue comes up with merchandising and cross promotions. There has to be interest by other companies to want to team up with Disney to do merchandising and cross promotion. Avengers was a sure fire hit so companies would obviously want to team up with Disney for that film to get their money’s worth. That’s why that film had so many tie ins and cross promotions.

  Again I don’t recall Wrath of the Titans having a lot of cross promotion either. Battleship had some with Subway and of cross Hasbro did cross promotion since the film was based on their game.

• MBurns wrote:

  Disney poured in $100 million to market John Carter. I don’t see how that shows a lack of commitment to the movie. The people involved in the marketing just made some bad choices in naming the movie and creating the ads. It happens.

  Well yes and no. Disney did spend $100m and one would expect nothing less because failure to at least “spend the money” and buy the ads would constitute corporate malpractice. But buying TV ads and populating them with trailers — which is where 60% of the money went — is not a complete measure of a marketing campaign by any stretch. What was particularly strange in this case was a demonstrable and measurable lack of effort…. For example (just one) …. from the end of D23 in August 2011 until November 2011 when the final 100 day push began, Disney put out 45 media/press placements for John Carter. During the exact same period, the total for Hunger games was over 1100, and the total for Disney’s own Avengers (10 weeks behind John Carter in the pipeline) was 1400++. So JC’s main competition for March buzz, Hunger Games, had more than 20 times the number of article placements, and another Disney film, John Carter stablemate Avengers, had almost 30 times more. Why? Big bad conspiracy? No. Corporate politics and priorities? Yes. JC was being promoted in-house by MT Carney’s team and most of the ones who would work on John Carter were also working on the Muppets, which pened on November 23. John Carter just wasn’t a huge priority and it was being given the treatment of a second tier Disney release, like the Muppets (budget $45m), rather than a tentpole franchise starter. So …. there was a lack of commitment,demonstrably so — and that’s even without addressing the lack of merchandising, cross-promotions, and all the other special kinds of promotions that are undertaken in support of tentpole franchise starters.

  It’s not like Stanton made a perfect movie. The critical beating the movie took didn’t help exactly the box office either.

  Absolutely. In fact Iger’s atttude, and the attitude down through the ranks, was — if Stanton delivers a movie with 95% audience and critics approval, as he did with Nemo and Wall-E, then the promotions will be adequate and it will be a hit. And if not . . . .it wont’. The thing is, it is not normal Hollywood practice to build a campaign on the ASSUMPTION the director will deliver a 95% smash word of mouth hit. That kind of outcome is wonderful — but rare. The business model normally operates on the assumption that the film, with good promotion, will be profitable with more modest achievement by the director. In this case, Stanton’ didn’t get the 95% rating he got with his previous movies — he made miscalculations, perhaps he didnt understand the material or the audience or the medium as well as he did with Nemo and Wall-E. But he did deliver a film which, with a lower budget (partly his fault) and better promotion (partly his fault) could have been enough of a financial success to warrant sequels. But the weak promotion and big budget meant the bar that Stanton need to get over with the movie itself was far too high, and he didn’t even come close to getting over it. With good promotion, the bar would have been set lower. Would he have gotten over it? Who knows? I don’t.

  As for the annoucement of the $200 million loss after 10 days. Anyone familiar with how the box office works could have made a educated guess on how much this movie was going to lose after 10 days. Once you have the first weekend take and the second weekend drop you can pretty much estimate the final take of most movies after 10 days.

  It’s absolutely true that after you have the first two weekends you have enough to make a close estimate of what the final box office will be. Kinda funny how people trot out this, though. For example, on the Monday morning after Avatar’s second weekend I started blogging that it was a sure bet to beat Titanic and you should have heard the blasts that came my way. But it was true — starting at 75m, then not dropping, and with Cameron’s dropoff trends/patterns in front of me, it was completely clear he was going to beat Titanic but I had few agreeing with me until many weeks later.

  Same in this case. No one doubts that it was possible to project a likely final outcome at the point they made the announcement. The issue/question is — why did they feel it was necessary to make a special, out-of-cycle announcement for John Carter when they didn’t do the same for Mars Needs Moms or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — two other huge bombs on Iger’s watch? The typical practice is to wait until the next quarterly report and include the writedown there. The special announcement was unusual. Was it some big conspiracy against John Carter? No — I dont think so. I think it was an announcement that suited Disney/Iger from a number of perspectives ranging from protecting the stock price to keeping Iger from having to squirm at the next quarterly conference call (and he had squirmed mightily at the quarterly call after Mars Needs Moms … thus lesson learned). Was the Lucasfilm Star Wars situation part of the calculation? Did Lucas actually care whether Disney had any future John Carter movies in the pipeline? In other words, would Lucas be less inclined to have SW be acquired by Disney if SW had to share the spotlight with another interplanetary series? I personally think that, logically, the prospects of the Lucasfilm Acquistion would be brightened by having clarity that there was only one interplanetary franchise, and that was Star Wars. Others have argued that it wouldn’t matter — that Lucas wouldn’t care. I dont’ have any hard evidence and in the end, it doesn’t really matter that much as there were plenty of other justifications for the way Disney handled the John Carter announcements . . . but if the goal is to try and get a complete understanding of why things played out as they did, this is an area that bears investigation. That’s all … just investigate it, not to assign blame, but to achieve a greater level of understanding.

• “What happened with John Carter is baffling in that, logically, you would think a studio would not dump $250m into a project and then a) let the director do whatever he wanted without checks and balances and b) give it only a cursory and poorly managed promotion. It is not in the apparent self-interest of the studio to do this . . . so then you start looking for alternate scenarios that help explain it.”

  Or maybe it’s right in front of you and you can’t see it? See I go with Occum’s Razor here, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. How many movies have bombed because of directorial excess? Rampant egotism? Overspending and studio incompetence?

  Those were all things that John Carter had in spades. Or how about this? If Iger felt that John Carter was a pointless expense, why not nip in the bud to start with? After all as pointed out Disney acquired Marvel in August 2009, five months before Carter went in production. I know the official defense is they were far ahead with casting, design, location scouting, etc. The Lone Ranger was apparently mere weeks from shooting when Rich Ross originally pulled the plug there so that defesne doesn’t really work. There is a reason why but we’ll get to that in a moment.

  Fast forward to May 2011 and Iger meets George Lucas and begins to think about getting Star Wars and Lucasfilm. Now at this point Hollywood knew Lucas was working on a new SW film, it had been reported and rumored for a while and most rumors in Hollywood usually turns out to be true. Where was Carter at this time? In the middle of Stanton’s reshoots to fix, add and dead wife-fy the movie. The film’s marketing team was also at work trying to appease him. After all the teaser trailer premiered a month later with Harry Potter and as you reported in your book they had been struggling for a while-at least two or three months-to come up with one to please Stanton. The conflicts between Stanton and MT Carney were already there and the decision to skip Comic-Con, to not promote ERB’s legacy was already decided without Iger’s pursuit of Star Wars being the cause.

  Now let’s return back to the question of why didn’t Iger kill Carter? Well you said it yourself Michael-to appease Stanton and Pixar. That’s it. That’s the razor. There was no scheme to kill it because it didn’t fit or just ignoring it. If that was the case why did they spend 100 million on marketing? Why not just spend 20 million if they had such low belief in it?

  See that’s the real reason. There is no evil plans, no grand scheme, no “Paul is Dead.” Just what has always happened in Hollywood. Pure incompentence and ego.

• Disney poured in $100 million to market John Carter. I don’t see how that shows a lack of commitment to the movie. The people involved in the marketing just made some bad choices in naming the movie and creating the ads. It happens. It’s not like Stanton made a perfect movie. The critical beating the movie took didn’t help exactly the box office either.

  As for the annoucement of the $200 million loss after 10 days. Anyone familiar with how the box office works could have made a educated guess on how much this movie was going to lose after 10 days. Once you have the first weekend take and the second weekend drop you can pretty much estimate the final take of most movies after 10 days. JC had opened in virtually all its markets by than and the few remaining ones were not going to make much difference in its final box office performance. Many media outlets were already running stories estimating how much the movie would lose after the first weekend.

• Agreed Michael, I’m not looking to assign blame for what happened with John Carter, and I’m certainly not blaming Star Wars. I’m a HUUUUGE Star Wars fan, and I’m looking forward to the upcoming films. And I’m certainly not blaming Iger with his decision as it’s a no brainer. If I’m given the keys to either John Carter or Star Wars as a film franchise I’m taking Star Wars every time. Heck the merchandising alone over the next 3-4 years will pay for their $4 billion investment (Hasbro alone made $250 million off of licensed products last year with no film supporting their toys).

  Yancy

• MCR, I tend to think Yancy has got this about right and I don’t understand why you think this is about “blame”. It’s about making sense of what happened. What happened with John Carter is baffling in that, logically, you would think a studio would not dump $250m into a project and then a) let the director do whatever he wanted without checks and balances and b) give it only a cursory and poorly managed promotion. It is not in the apparent self-interest of the studio to do this . . . so then you start looking for alternate scenarios that help explain it.

  The idea that John Carter was an “outlier” is not paranoid or conspiracy-minded. Cook got the rights in a play that, in retrospect, seems as much designed to keep Stanton in the fold and Pixar appeased as it seems to be a major strategic push to make John Carter a franchise. Then, on a separate track, Iger — who is a “serial acquisitions” guy, first landed Marvel (more boy franchises than Disney knew what to do with — thus pushing John Carter farther to the margins) . . . and then moved on to Lucasfilms (and quite possibly was already having discussions with Lucas even before the Marvel deal was fully done.

  If I’m a coldblooded Disney shareholder and there are the possible franchises on the table — Marvel (multiple franchises), Lucasfilms, and John Carter — which one seems like a longshot? John Carter of course. So Iger would be completely justified in chasing Marvel and Lucasfilms at the expense of John Carter — with “at the expense” meaning that corporte interest in, and commitment to, John Carter would wane in the fact of strategic acquisitions-in-progress that marginalized John Carter.

  All of it adds up. The part that I’m not sure about is just when Iger started to focus on Lucasfilms as an acquisitons target. Yancy has the timeline for Star Wars development down very clearly. What’s unclear is when Iger/Disney entered the picture. Iger claims in was May 2011 but it it likely was sooner.

  And please — one more time — this is not about assigning blame. It’s about interpreting actions that seem on the surface to not make sense, but which do in fact make sense once deeper motivations and circumstances are considered.

• No, there’s no vast conspiracy at work here. Iger simply had his eyes on Star Wars from some time and was not going to let the John Carter project stand in the way. It’s pretty obvious Iger had little interest in John Carter as this was Dick Cook’s baby:

  1) Iger/Disney had been pursuing Star Wars since the late 90s with the Prequel Trilogy, and again had initial interest in The Clone Wars animated series in 2005. Additionally there were plans under way following Revenge of the Sith to re-imagine Disneyland’s Tomorrowland with a Star Wars theme and additional Star Wars rides. This plan was later scrapped.

  2) It is very clear pre-production work had begun on Star Wars Episode VII in late 2010 and was well under way in 2011 (this was confirmed by ILM employees as well as production staff of the Clone Wars). Lucas was beginning to talk retirement, so clearly the torch would need to passed on to someone else. Given Lucasfilm’s involvement in multiple media formats (Lucas Arts, Lucas Books, ILM, etc.), the only logical partner would be Disney.

  3) If an offer was made to Disney in 2011, it would explain why a film that had tested so well in early screenings in 2011 was given such an incompetent and vanilla media campaign. This is especially evident given how Disney’s own marketing research numbers showed confusion over the by movie goers over what exactly John Carter was based on trailers and showed a complete lack of knowledge of the history of the character.

  4) This would also explain why Iger was willing to put such a negative spin on Carter only 10 days after its release. This was a curious move given this was a “tentpole” movie and still had a number of foreign markets to be released in (and Carter was putting up decent numbers there).

  This was simply a case of Iger wishing to milk as much money from Carter as he could while still assuring the Star Wars franchise would be their next “tentpole” franchise.

  Yancy

• I don’t know. It seems Yancy thinks there was some vast conspiracy. Why is it so hard to believe a movie can just fail? Was there some plan for causing Battleship or Dark Shadows or Jack Reacher to fail at the box office?

  Or is it just not wanting to face the reality that John Carter just cost too much, that it had no major stars and Disney went after the wrong audience by ignoring the sci-fi or geek crowd that knew the books or even the comic book versions? Is it because that it would put blame on the previously blameless Great Stanton? Or did we forget MT Carney and her blundering marketing and Rich Ross’ inability to stand up to big bad Andrew? Those are more believable reasons than this constant Star Wars is at fault.

  Or was I right before and the fact that you never liked SW causing this?

  Oh well take solace in this. Since one of those spin offs speculated is about a young Han Solo maybe Taylor Kitsch can play him. Since when he wasn’t whining he was imitating Harrison Ford, just without the humor. Maybe Kasdan can give him humor?

• I love lens flares.

  Whaow. No Star Wars for years and now they’re going for overkill… I really don’t know what to think about that. At first glance it seems too much at a time!

  Disney has always been clear in their statements; they bought Lucasfilm to make Star Wars films only. Even Indiana Jones is not part of their plans (not to mention Howard the Duck…).

  At the time being I worry more about the future of Disney’s own movie division. The Lone Ranger and Oz don’t seem that interesting to me. When/if Andrew Stanton wants to do another John Carter (I still stubbornly assume that it is his intention after Nemo 2), will there still be a potential home for the movie at all?

• Standalone SW movies? Jar Jar: The Next Generation! Can’t wait to see Abrams go crazy with lens flares on lightsabers.

• Awww…..MCR….and you’ve been so nice lately!

  No one that I know — and certainly not yours truly — is even intimating that someone “at Lucasfilm told Andrew Stanton to go our and spend 25o million and deliver a mediocre movie”. Where did you get that?

  It feels to me like you’re missing the point of what I was simply speculating about . . . which is, at what point did the Lucasfilm acquisition come into play? We all know that Iger plays the acquisition game and moves from one to the next. We already know that the deal for Marvel, announced in August 2009 as JC was in advanced prep, didn’t help John Carter’s position within Disney. But Iger says he never even thought about Lucasfilms until he bumped into Lucas in May 2011 . . . . .

  But this is not about intentionally sabotaging John Carter which is what you seem determined to say that I’m saying and I ain’t saying that, never have. It’s more a matter of trying to fathom why Disney just let Stanton run wild (something you agree they did as I recall) and why they put no demonstrable real effort into marketing it.

  In other words, it’s about filling in gaps in our understanding of the dynamics that caused it to play out the way it did — not about “finding someone to blame” …… you ought to know by now that finding someone to blame of coming up with a conspiracy is not what ‘s going on when I write something like that.

• I don’t think this absurd at all. As early as 2009 there were rumblings of future Star Wars films, and by late 2010, rumors had begun to solidify and inside sources at Lucasfilm were hinting that another trilogy was in the works with a 2015 or 2016 release date:

  http://nerdbastards.com/2010/10/23/rumor-3-new-star-wars-movies/

  Add to this with the release of the Clone Wars TV series (which almost went to Disney by the way), it was clear Lucas no longer felt any obligation to 20th Century Fox. And given the growing relationship between Iger and Lucas in 2010 with the impending release of Star Tour 2.0, it doesn’t take much of a stretch to connect the dots.

  It’s clear Lucas, at some point during this period, revealed to Iger that he was developing a new trilogy of Star Wars films. Disney had tried to land the property in the late 90s with the Prequel trilogy, but Lucas gave Fox the first shot. So it’s clear Star Wars was a franchise Disney had wanted for some time. Untimately, Star Wars would be the other tentpole franchise Iger was looking for.

  A $200 million write off was a small price to pay for the bigger prize… And yes, given how small a piece of the Disney pie the film division accounts for, it’s nothing more than pocket change to the Mouse.

  Yancy

• Really? We’re back to this again? Look I don’t like Iger but seriously I doubt George Lucas or anyone at Lucasfilm told Andrew Stanton to go out and spend 250 million and deliver a mediocre movie. Or that Lucas had any sway over the marketing campaign. How much of this “we need to find someone to blame” game is going to continue? Until Iger leaves or Episode VII bombs at the box office to prove that it was a bad decision and that the right was to back Stanton’s futhering butchering?

  Or is it possible that this had nothing to do with John Carter not working. I don’t think, despite the long reach of Star Wars, that this deal influenced the critics of the film. Or the audiences who failed to show up and the lacking word of mouth it had when it came out. Or even the marketing since I don’t think Lucas was involved there. Now if there is evidence then let someome come forward to prove it. Until then let’s just move on from this. It’s not a strong arguement and it reeks of sour grapes.