'John Carter,' aka the Edgar Rice Burroughs 'A Princess of Mars' adaptation

21 Jump Street 2: 42 Jump Street

xp

"Walt Disney has said it expects to lose $200m (£126m) on its movie John Carter, making it one of the biggest flops in cinema history."

gah, this is so wrong and so colossally stupid. i can see why the film might have underperformed no matter what, as it's a bit silly and old-fashioned overall, but the promotion was criminally bad. first of all, it should have been called JOHN CARTER OF MARS. just plain old "john carter" is meaningless. it doesn't even suggest anything interesting. and the television ad campaign was horrible. i tried to get my gf's dad, who's usually up for anything in the line of old school high adventure, to go. he refused, saying it looked "like that 300 movie". and he was right, sort of. all you got from the ads was jumping and fighting in a desert, with some monsters and flying machines thrown in for color. no hint of story, character or setting. maybe the dumbest, most self-destructive ad campaign i've ever seen for a film of this type. it should have been promoted as a successor to avatar, ffs! swashbuckling hero, period setting, epic scope, interplanetary adventure & romance! would at least have sold a few more tickets than who-the-fuck-is "john carter" jumping around in a desert somewhere, chopping up the hordes.

I think 3D puts people off too, which is totally understandable- having to wear some stupid glasses for some pretty redundant 3D effects, and pay more for the privilege, is really annoying.

what's so wrong is it cost $250 M before promotion.

none of that money was spent on acting lessons either.

Taylor Kitsch already knows how to take his shirt off and make puppy faces, so acting lessons are redundant. All Dominic West needed was a jug with xxx on it. Lynn Colins is apparently a shakesperian actor & Juliard grad?

they should have just called it WARLORD OF MARS

and the poster should have just had frazetta riggins stance where he's coming down on the horde screaming and the tag-line - STAY FLY...

and they should have had a cool rap theme song for the commercial.

it ain't brain surgery.

WARLORD OF MARS: 2 HIGH 2 DIE

they should just use that siren sound from inception with a slowly strobing zoom in on Lynn Collons's breasts

and then splice to gether a couple scenes to make it look like Dominic West is drunkenly crashing his ship and making his shenanigans face

I think 3D puts people off too, which is totally understandable- having to wear some stupid glasses for some pretty redundant 3D effects, and pay more for the privilege, is really annoying.

uh, maybe, but i don't see any reason to think this was a factor. 3D has often been a box office booster. i mean, maybe the bubble's burst, but if so, this is first i'm hearing of it.

I think maybe people are getting wise to the fact that there's no reason to see e.g. A Very Harold & Kumar Xmas in 3D? Just my perception, admittedly.

That's exactly the kind of movie you should see in 3D. At least they know it's a stupid gimmick

3D's been collapsing in terms of box office for 18 months.

what's so wrong is it cost $250 M before promotion.

yeah, this is sadly true. it shouldn't have cost anywhere near that much.

3D's been collapsing in terms of box office for 18 months.

have heard this, but haven't seen the stats. any links you know of?

70% of Avatar's sales come from 3D; 40% of Harry Potter 7.2 came from 3D. Not a bubble as much as cyclical, I think.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jeffrey-katzenberg-why-hollywood-is-196616

Not 18 months - 9.

i almost feel bad when i'm completely blasé about these incredibly expense visual effects they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put on the screen. like, they're trying so hard, good for them, but i can't remember the last time i looked at CGI in a live action movie and felt like the money spent was remotely worth it.

everybody's sick of artificially inflated spectacle, i think. it ain't a barnum and bailey world any more; throwing vast fantastical expanses and computerized pyrotechnics and digital establishing matte shots at the screen just leads to fatigue.

what's astounding to me is the that CGI at one point was considered a way to bring costs down, no? virtual worlds costing pennies on the dollar compared to models etc

watching buck rogers episodes on netflix with the kids and still totally enjoyable even though they spent five bucks an episode. 3 of that went to guest stars like jack palance and roddy mcdowell and one dollar for spandex and one dollar for fx.

I can't remember the last time i was intrigued or impressed by the CGI-exaggerated scope/scale of a world. Maybe 'How to Train Your Dragon'? It's a sad state, when the basically limitless possibilities of world-building and fantasy representation afforded by new techology elicits, like, a jaded shrug.

It's a failure of imagination and creativity, i.e., "Ooh, we can put basically anything on screen. So let's do a regressive sword and sandals epic but make the monsters bigger and uglier."

longstanding lament of mine:

When Is Someone Gonna Make A Sci-Fi Show Or Movie Without Any People In Them?

ss: i have referenced that thread in real life conversations. the asesthetic of fantasy and sci-fi movies/tv seems to be locked in a '70s airbrushed van art groove, but lamer.

It's a failure of imagination and creativity, i.e., "Ooh, we can put basically anything on screen. So let's do a regressive sword and sandals epic but make the monsters bigger and uglier."

yeah, this is a fair point. imagine that a lot of that CGI money went to generating boring, barren martian landscapes (which looked pointedly dull in comparison to the gorgeous and obviously real shots of the ride down the river iss) and unimpressively "grand" interiors. there were some nice ruins here and there, but they were briefly glimpsed, unexplored. sort of wondered why they didn't have carter travel way, way back in time as well as across the solar system, even if that meant deviating from ERB. would have allowed for a more visually interesting mars.

and it's not like it's impossible to create interesting world-visions w CGI. i recently watched this super shitty french sci-fi flick called renaissance, which managed to create an intriguing (if clearly blade runner-derived) world on what was probably less than a 10th of john carter's budget.

Slate has had several good death of 3D pieces. This may be the best, and it's two years old:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/08/is_3d_dead_in_the_water.html

I can't remember the last time i was intrigued or impressed by the CGI-exaggerated scope/scale of a world.

Zodiac.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT491ctM8Kk

was not at all impressed by the very obvious CGI in zodiac. took me completely out of the movie. everything seemed weird and fake, most gratingly the overhead shot of the cab ride.

Seriously? So you saw all the scenes above and knew it was all CGI at the time? Or did you go into the movie knowing it was CGI? Because I had no idea.

Seriously? haha xp

Were you actually like, "Fuck this bullshit, I can no longer enjoy this gripping crime thriller because they CGI'ed a cab instead of rebuilding 1969 San Francisco and renting a helicopter!!!"

Zodiac cgi was fantastic.

nah, i mean, i probably missed a lot of the more "ordinary" looking stuff, but the cab ride scene really threw me and after that i was looking for (and finding, no suprise) fakeyness everywhere.

plus i just didn't dig the movie, overall. been meaning to rewatch it for quite some time because i seem to be in the minority on this, love downey and loved the social network.

contenderizer contending

Robert Downey Jr. was an entirely CGI creation. You didn't know that?

Rango was all right as a world, but the visual style was hardly new or exciting.

whoa i had no idea there was cgi in zodiac, that video just blew my entire mind

it has that effect on people

See? Awesome. I rest my case.

the cgi in zodiac is great, but sometimes i wonder why they can't just find a two lane highway at night.

bcz david fincher

they should have cgi-extravagandapted c.s. lewis' out of the silent planet.

or as it no doubt would have been called, out of.

in case of potential confusion with Disney flop Treasure Planet