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No advertising. Cancel anytime. Related stories Test your knowledge Think you're a film buff? Take our movie trivia quiz! Copy link Link copied. Mark Sappenfield Editor. Subscribe to insightful journalism. It's now being grouped with infamous disasters such as Heaven's Gate , the western that helped put United Artists out of business, and Eddie Murphy's putrid sci-fi comedy The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Indeed, in the realm of gleefully anticipated pre-release flops, John Carter is hardly Titanic , which saw its opening date delayed amid disastrous rumors but wound up setting box office records and winning Oscars. But the film is no Ishtar , either. The movie hasn't really earned its place in classic turkey lore, for several key reasons.
Outside of the U. John Carter posted the fourth-biggest Russian opening of all time and it's performed strongly in Asia, without even opening in China or Japan, the continent's two biggest markets. There's also the legacy question. A true flop must be a flop in every sense, with a financial shortfall matched by a creative failure.
On the other hand, John Carter has been hailed as "colorful and kind of fun" in the New York Times and applauded for its "utterly immersive and lifelike" characters by NPR. The Atlantic 's Christopher Orr praised the film's "hokey charms.
The sci-fi action movie, based on the influential Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, was intended as a lavish, big-budget, CGI-heavy extravaganza that would allow the studio to keep up with the likes of Marvel, James Bond, and Star Trek at the time.
Disney pumped everything they had into the John Carter movie: an Oscar-winning director; an up-and-coming leading man surrounded by industry buzz; one of the biggest reported budgets ever for a live-action movie; and more than 2, visual-effects shots.
It was meant to be a sure-fire hit, a blockbuster to rival the likes of The Avengers and The Hobbit trilogy. So, why exactly did John Carter flop as spectacularly as it did? The Barsoom series by Burroughs was a popular pulp saga of sci-fi fantasy published between and While these tales of aliens on Mars never became as ubiquitous as Burroughs's other major creation, Tarzan, they still wielded a mighty influence over the next century of science-fiction as a whole.
Authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert A. Heinlein were heavily inspired by the Barsoom books, as were stories like Star Wars , Avatar , and Babylon 5. Burroughs's stories of Mars were so beloved that the author even has a real crater on the planet named after him!
However, the work itself has, over the decades, mostly been overlooked in favor of that which it influenced. Name recognition alone does not make a movie hit. One of the major stumbling blocks for wannabe franchises of the past decade has been the misguided desire to replicate the mold pioneered by superhero movies.
If they made it work with superheroes then why not try it out with one of the stories that helped to lay the groundwork for that genre? In an effort to play catch-up to a franchise that spent years developing its intricately woven multiple narratives, many studios tried to do the work of three or four movies in one.
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