John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

[Finarvyn]

Anyone else read this book?

www.amazon.com/John-Carter-Hollywood-Michael-Sellers/dp/0615682316

I saw this guy's blog a while back and thought it was an interesting read. He explains some of what went wrong when the John Carter movie cost $250M and made pretty much the same money back, yet is considered to be one of the biggest movie disasters of all time. The book is more of the same, only with additional details and background.

For example, he talks about how Andrew Stanton (of Pixar fame) was thinking that not enough potential fans would have any real familiarity with the books so he made certain changes to the characters to "modernize" them -- a decision that seems to have alienated pretty much all of the hard-core Barsoom fans but made a better movie for the casual fan to follow -- but then Disney failed to support the movie by explaining to the casual fan what the heck the movie was all about. (Such as changing the name from "John Carter of Mars" to just "John Carter" so that a lot of folks had no idea that it was supposed to occur on another planet).

It also talks about how the original Superman, Flash Gordon, Star Wars, Avatar, and others took so much inspiration from the Barsoom books that when it was time for the Mars movie to be made it would have looked like it copied everything from everyone else even though Burroughs did it first a century ago.

I also had no idea just how much of a big deal Burroughs was back in the day. I knew that he had created Barsoom and Tarzan and dozens of other books, but didn't know just how much money he was raking in annually from book sales. And how popular Tarzan was at the time. And how the John Carter movie rights had been passed around for decades with various movie scripts being written and re-written but no one being able to swing the massive funding needed to do the movie right.

Anyway, I'm around 1/3 of the way through the book and am enjoying it but am still bummed that no sequel seems to be at all on the horizon. :

[foxroe]

Interesting, but not too surprising. I can count on one hand (that's missing fingers) how many times Hollywood has done a book-to-film justice. It's always about money and not the story. [/opinion]

With regards to Burrough's popularity, if you've seen the Wonder Woman movie, there's a direct nod to him in it. They're looking through their supply of bribes/gifts/wares for the front line troops (WWI), and the items for the Americans(?) are Burroughs novels. I thought that was a nice touch.

[Finarvyn]

Around 200 pages into the book and it's still interesting to see how Disney really made advertising for this movie so FUBAR. No toy or game merchandising, hardly any presence on the internet, very little "buzz" coming from Disney.

I had always thought that John Carter was somehow just not on my radar at the time, but it appears that it wasn't on ANYBODY'S radar.

[foxroe]

Sept 23, 2017 12:26:42 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

Around 200 pages into the book and it's still interesting to see how Disney really made advertising for this movie so FUBAR. No toy or game merchandising, hardly any presence on the internet, very little "buzz" coming from Disney.

I had always thought that John Carter was somehow just not on my radar at the time, but it appears that it wasn't on ANYBODY'S radar.

It's a shame, really. Despite my bias toward the books, I rather enjoyed the movie. A sequel would have been fun, especially if they gave it the "pulp feel" a la Raiders of the Lost Ark.

[grodog]

I didn't read ERB until I was into my 30s, I think, so I don't have the strong attachment to his works that I do to Moorock, HPL, CAS, Gygax, The Hobbit and Silmarillion, and others.

That said, I do enjoy the first four Barsoom books quite a bit, and have re-read them a few times, and would look forward to another film that took some of the interesting ideas from "John Carter" (I liked it too) and blended them back into the novels.

Marv: the book you're reading sounds pretty interesting, I may have to see if the library has a copy!

Allan.

[Finarvyn]

Allan, you can also find the blog that Michael Sellers was doing before he wrote the book.

thejohncarterfiles.com/

It's really amazing how a movie that earned nearly $300M could have been counted as a failure, and it's hard to say how much of that was by incompetence and how much was intentional. Crazy stuff.

[Finarvyn]

Finished the book. I'm not into "conspiracy theory" stuff, but this kind of book does make one wonder what happens behind the scenes for things and we know nothing about it.

[Finarvyn]

Quite a bit, actually. Disney acquired both AVENGERS and STAR WARS at roughly the time when they should have been paying attention to JOHN CARTER. For some reason they seem to have thought that the franchises all targeted the same demographic (males 10-15) and they seemed to believe that supporting all three would take viewers from their others, so John Carter suffered. The book noted that none of the advertisements or posters featured Dejah Thoris, and no attempt was made to mention the romantic angle. This goes back to their target demographic, which apparently didn't include girls of any age. Strange,

[ritt]

I'm a middle-aged man, and I'm still ticked off that they didn't do a toy line.

I wanted a big-@ss white ape for my desk.

[foxroe]

Sept 28, 2017 19:55:59 GMT -6 ritt said:

I'm a middle-aged man, and I'm still ticked off that they didn't do a toy line.

I wanted a big-@ss white ape for my desk.

Why have one, when you can have an army!

Edit: Link to the blog where I found those.

[ritt]

Sept 28, 2017 21:41:38 GMT -6 foxroe said:

Sept 28, 2017 19:55:59 GMT -6 ritt said:

Why have one, when you can have an army!

Noooooo! Stop! Too many apes! They're getting loose! They're rampaging! Iiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Thanks for the cool link!

[Finarvyn]

Sept 28, 2017 19:55:59 GMT -6 ritt said:

I'm a middle-aged man, and I'm still ticked off that they didn't do a toy line.

I wanted a big-@ss white ape for my desk.

Agreed. Years ago there was a "Tarzan" toy line that had a couple of John Carter figures for some odd reason. I remember having a buff Tars Tarkas with a button on his back that would say Raaar or some such when you pushed it. Much fun, and I'm sad that I ever let it go.

[ritt]

That was a great toy line, based on the short-lived, not too bad, Tarzan syndicated TV show that was done in a very Hercules/Xena vein. Tars was the only one I got.