John Sagar of the Back to Barsoom John Carter Sequel Facebook Group has posted the news that the John Carter DVD in the Asda-Walmart chart has moved up from no 6 to number 4. Walmart has also increased the price of the DVD from 10 pounds to 12-97—nearly a 3 pound increase. We’ll be looking into this more deeply — obviously for fans of the movie, seeing it move up the charts and increase in price, rather than follow the expected pattern of dropping down the charts and dropping in price, is interesting and worth a further look.
This article was notable for one thing only — it cites the budget (meaning production investment) for John Carter as being confirmed at $275m — and sure enough, if you link back to the Hollywood Reporter article it cites for this, THR says that Disney, in connection with it’s Quarterly earnings statement that went out on May 8, apparently said the John Carter budget was in fact $275. This helps explain the writedown being $200m, and is news. A word of caution — what we have now is THR saying that Disney says the production investment was $275 — but I have never actually seen a quote from Disney to that effect and did not see it in the actual release by Disney of Q2 figures — it’s possible something was said on the conference call, I’m not sure.
In any event, here is the E!Online Article:
Battleship vs John Carter: What’s the Bottom Line
And here is the THR Article:
Disney Beats Expectations in Spite of John Carter
And here is the actual Disney release of Q2 Financials:
This article from David Kownow at TG Daily brings up some interesting info regarding the $100m take in the first six days of the DVD release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Thea analogy to John Carter is not that good, in that King Kong opened at $50m theatrically en route to $218m domestic gross — a considerably better outcome than John Carter. But there is some reason to hope that John Carter will do relatively better on DVD/Blu-ray than it did theatrically — at least enough to exceed expectations of what would be “normal” for a film grossing only $70m at the domestic box office.
Many had been predicting the failure of John Carter months before it happened, and in the post mortem of the film many blamed various marketing and regime problems at Disney.
John Carter ultimately cost Disney chairman Rich Ross his job, and it’s reportedly the biggest write-down in Hollywood history to the tune of $200 million.
As Cinema Blend writes, “The months leading up to Disney’s release of John Carter were like watching a car stall out on the tracks in front of an oncoming train.
“Everyone saw the disaster coming, countless people pointed out the impending collision, but no one in power seemed willing to go lend a hand before it was too late.”
Still, when you meet regular people who’ve actually seen the movie, not the critics or box office pundits, not to mention if you read the comments about John Carter stories here on TG, the film definitely has its fans, and it also makes you wonder if the movie will eventually find an audience on DVD, Blu-Ray and Streaming when it comes out for home viewing on June 5.
Where now the foreign market is crucial for a film’s success, you may recall the DVD market became important for a film’s success, much like the VCR boom of the early eighties. In fact, there was a point around 2005 where some movies were getting a bottom line theatrical release, so it could come out on DVD as quickly as possible. (You may also recall Fight Club became the #1 buy to own movie, and where it flopped at the box office, it was finally in the black from DVD sales).
The Peter Jackson remake of King Kong also didn’t live up to expectations in theaters, but made a ton of money the first week it was available on DVD. As Michael Pellerin, who created Peter Jackson’s production diaries, told me, “The truth is that because films are accessible so quickly, many people just decide, ‘Hey, I’m waiting for the DVD,’ especially if you’ve got a film that runs 3 hours long like Kong, they’re likely to say, ‘You know what, I’ll just wait for the DVD and watch it at home.’ Kong-, I guess it made between $5-600 million or something like that. I was like ‘Yeah, but wait for the DVD, watch what happens.’
“Sure enough, the DVD comes out and makes $100 million in six days,” Pellerin continues. “You could’ve predicted that a mile away, because that’s where the rest of your audience is. The movie came out at the end of December, it came out on DVD the end of March, and part of that is because movie studios want to take advantage of the advertising window of the movie’s theatrical run. You still want it to be somewhat fresh in the audience’s mind, not six months or a year later as it used to be.”
So we at TG will definitely be watching to see if John Carter has another new audience waiting for it, one that doesn’t care about the reviews or the box office prophecies of doom, and are willing to check out the film for themselves.
One of the things that’s of interest under the general framework of what I’m looking at with “Hollywood vs Mars” is to compare the advance media narrative for John Carter (“epic folly/epic fail is inevitable”) with the narrative that preceded the release of Battleship (pretty similar but less of it) , plus the “Monday morning after” coverage Battleship is receiving vs what John Carter received, and finally to compare the manner in which Comcast/Universal handles the announcement of a write-down compared to how Disney handled the same even with John Carter.
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John Carter fans have been holding out hope that Battleship starring Taylor Kitsch will do well enough in the US to provide a boost to John Carter as the DVD/Blu-ray release approaches. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that’s going to be the case. Battleship was being projected to open in the $35-40m range; but based on an opening Friday figure of $9m, it looks more like a $25m weekend for the Universal/Hasbro film directed by Peter Berg. For reference — John Carter opened at 9.8m en route to a 30.2M opening weekend.
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Avenger wasn’t the only film to do something extraordinary this past weekend. John Carter, on it’s “move-over” weekend where it picked up 165 second run theaters, bringing it’s total screens up to 385, saw its weekend tally jump from $125,000 the previous weekend, to $1,049M as initially reported on Sunday (including estimates) and $1,494,367 as reported today (actuals). That’s an increase of 1,224%. Also, the per screen average jumped from $627 per screen the previous weekend, to $4,282 this weekend — a number that put it in second place overall behind Avengers on a per screen average.
Trying to put some perspective on this, we looked at the films that Box Office Mojo considers to be “com parables” for John Carter — Cowboys and Aliens, Green Lantern, and Prince of Persia. All of them experienced an uptick on the “move-over” week — but nothing like this. the best of the lot was Prince of Persia which went from $49,000 to $229,000 on the equivalent weekend, an increase of $363%, with a per-screen jump of $731 to $1,138.
The fact that this happened on Avengers weekend is what muddies the waters. Was it Avengers overflow? But if that were the case, wouldn’t other films have been equally affected, or at least similarly? There is no evidence of that in the Box Office Mojo numbers — it’s only John Carter with this big a jump.
We are waiting to see if Disney has anything to say about this. As a harbinger of the Home Entertainment release, this has to be construed as good news — but caution is indicated until more is known about how Avengers played a role in this.
From The Echo of California Lutheran University by Taylor Lampela
Have you seen “John Carter”?
Or how about a better question, did you even want to see “John Carter”? According to the box office tally, not many people did and it’s poised to lose upwards of $200 million, according to a recent article on Gawker.com. How could such a big budget action fantasy adventure made by Disney flop so badly?
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When a wannabe blockbuster turns out to be a turkey of a film and flops miserably, we don’t need any explanations — it’s clear what just happened. A bad movie tanked. It’s simple. Mars Needs Moms, Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate all fall into this category. They were flops and they were turkeys.
But this year has brought us Disney’s John Carter, a film which flopped so badly that 10 days after its release it was officially certified by no less an authority than its own studio as the biggest flop in the history of cinema, causing a $200M write down in the quarter of its release. If its own studio classifies it as an epic flop, then it’s a flop. But is it a turkey?
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From Cellulloid Wonders by J. Kemp
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