Willem Dafoe “Baffled” by John Carter theatrical woes

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From Indiewire’s The Playlist

Today “John Carter” will be released on DVD and Blu-ray and, presumably, will be seen by a much larger audience than what turned up it when it was released theatrically this past spring. (The Blu-ray is a handsome, features-packed affair well worth picking up if you feel any love for the movie.) The film, which Disney recently admitted would cost the studio $200 million in lost profit, quickly became a cautionary fable about what happens when you try to launch a franchise based on a century-old property that no one much remembers anymore. One of the film’s stars, Willem Dafoe, who played a Martian warrior named Tars Tarkas, is still baffled by the critical and commercial indifference the film received.

“You don’t like to publicly lament disappointments too much, but I’m still kind of scratching my head over it,” Dafoetold IFC during a recent interview. “For me, I thought ‘John Carter’ really captured something. It was very pure in its approach. It was classical. It wasn’t hip and cool. It was really from the source, and I appreciate that.”

Dafoe says that the negative publicity affected the movie in untoward ways. “In my experience, sometimes a movie just hits at the wrong time, gets the wrong press, or gets the wrong representation, and it gets misunderstood.” He continued: “Sometimes it’s hard for people to really decide, too. There’s so much reporting about the business and that other stuff, that they really get distracted by some of those things, and then it influences some of the weaker-willed people to not have their own opinion.”

The actor, whose performance was turned into the animated, multi-limbed Tarkas via motion capture (it’s one of the best things about the movie), is also disappointed because he won’t get to explore the character in further “John Carter” sequels (an improbability at this point, barring some massive explosion in DVD and Blu-ray sales). “It sure doesn’t seem like [there will be a sequel], which is a shame,” Dafoe lamented.

Read the rest at Indiewire.

2 comments

  • Possibly the comments by Mr. Dafoe are old, but if you go to the “Rest of the Interview” you’ll see that it was posted just yesterday. Maybe he’s just recycling an old interview.

  • Isn’t it an old interview? I have already read those comments by Willem Dafoe. The blog seems to imply it’s in relation to the DVD release.

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