This weekend was a bad one for anybody hoping to see more pulpy space opera on screens: “John Carter” got pretty thoroughly thumped at the box office, grossing $30 million and coming in second to “Hollywood Gives Dr. Seuss The Bad Touch Part III”. To review, it has to make $700 million worldwide to be deemed a success by the Mouse House. Yeah, that’s…unlikely.
The reviews were about as lukewarm as we’ve come to expect, really. Tolkien adaptations can win Oscars and the critical establishment will still not get what makes movies like this enjoyable.
So, what about you? See it this weekend? If so, what’d you think?
image courtesy Disney
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I loved it. It was cheesy, it wasn’t the most original movie, but it was a ton of fun. It’s not an award winner but I’d recommend anyone see it. Better than any of the Star Wars prequels, better than anything on the sci fi channel… It was good. Great action, lots of humor. Crazy hot princess (I asked my wife during the “wedding” scene, “WHY DIDN’T YOUR WEDDING DRESS LOOK LIKE THAT!”. Got punched).
It reminded me of Poochie the Rockin’ Dog. And anybody who gets that knows exactly what I’m talking about, it was the film equivalent of a shuttlecock being bounced from committee to committee to committee. I bet halfway through someone tried to invent a way to get Pepsi and Nissan logos shoehorned in in some mystical way.
If television had been around back then or if John Carter had lived in the twenty-first century, I goddamn guarantee he would have let those crazy Martians fight it out for themselves, because Mad Men was about to come back for season 5 and it’s nearly 4pm, so margarita time.
Saw it and enjoyed the shit out of it. Was it art? No. Was it fun as hell to watch? Yes, absolutely.
Anyone crying about this movie needs to get their head out of their ass or go watch The Artist again. At the very least it was a new property and not a remake of something that came out less than 20 years ago or a threequel.
Disney took a chance, marketed the movie like shit and will likely pay the price and it’s a shame.
We will also pay the price, as this kind of attempt to create a new film series will be swept under the rug, and we’ll keep getting reboots of the same shit for the next 30 years.
What this also does is it crushes any hope of seeing “Dune” done correctly on the big screen, but that’s really for the best.
$30 million domestically, with another $70 million worldwide. Its take went up on Saturday from the Friday opening, which makes me think word of mouth helped it. Does this mean I think the film will make money and get me some sequels? Probably not – the narrative that it’s a giant bomb that no one is interested in seeing has been slapped on it for some time, and once it gets so tagged the snark machine wouldn’t have it any other way.
Saw it Friday night to about a 60% full theater. The audience seemed to enjoy it well enough – I overheard one woman mention trying to find the books to read as she was leaving the theater.
Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of it. It dragged momentarily here and there, but overall I think it’s a much better movie than Rotten Tomatoes would lead one to believe. The environment and green men looked pretty realistic, and I’m happy as hell the film wasn’t a green screen murk-fest like “Immortals” – it pays to go on location and build a goddamn set once in awhile. This is the first movie I’ve seen in some time where I actually want to see it again in the theater. If we only get one Barsoom movie ever, I happily accept this one.
I seriously enjoyed John Carter.
Saw it at a midnight IMAX show in Torrence and the rest of the theater seemed to really enjoy it too. Especially when the Calot (that doggy creature that looks like a giant chode crossed with a pug) lept into action I think the whole theater cheered. It was fun, decently written adventure that was at its center, some hard core sci-fi made into perfectly decent epic that didnt take itself too seriously or bog itself down with gobs of exposition.
I haven’t read the books in years but I thought Andrew Stanton did a great job fusing narrative elements of the later books with the majority of the plot from the first book. The performances were tight and not your usual somber epic sci-fi exposition-fest. I hope word of mouth does this movie justice because the unfortunate title and awful marketing absolutely hurt this flick in the states.
I mean, what was wrong with calling it John Carter: Chronicles of Mars? I get the directors theory about the name but still… Disney very obviously screwed this up. My hope is that the movie is able to stand on its own enough that we will get some sequels.
The 3D was good, The special effects were present but not distracting, none of the characters made me want to slap the writers, in fact it was pretty far removed from the soulless CGI suck-fests like Green Lantern, and it makes me a li’l sad that it may not get its due because of shitty marketing.
M0AR BARS00M!!!!
well all few of us nerd douchebags enjoyed it at least. I know I’ll be watching it again at some point and encouraging my friends to see it. Anything that will convince studios to take a chance on an original property instead of Transformidermanengers VII is a good thing to me.
I’m sure it has more than a little to do with the shitty ads on TV, which communicate nothing about the film’s story, or the time period, or anything even remotely interesting. Just special effects, and the fact that the story predates Avatar and Star Wars — which, so do a lot of things; who cares.
I loved it. Seeing it again this weekend. And I’m not an easy audience.
I loved it as well. I had high hopes due to Stanton and Pixar being involved, even though i wasn’t familiar with the source material, and was not disappointed at all. I to thought as I was sitting there that it was FAR superior to any of the Star Wars prequels. Sure, it was pulpy, but that was kind of the point. Pretty much all of the $250 million ended up on screen. Shame there won’t be another…
My son and I enjoyed it a lot. After seeing the movie, we couldn’t figure out why it got slammed by critics and why it had such a poor opening. It’s really sad when a fun movie like this gets no attention while poorer works make so much money.
I liked it. I would have changed a few things. The problem here is that this film never should have cost over $100 mil to make. If they had managed to bring it in for $100 million and then spent $10-15 mil promoting it, they might have made some money by the time the theater run was done, then garnered more profit from the DVD/Blu Ray sales. Because they let it balloon up to over $250 million, they are going to lose over $150 million easily.
John Carter himself was not well developed. Also, I found it unbelievable that a guy from that era of America could just figure out complex flying machines so quickly. I found the final battle rushed and unsatisfying. I found the love story totally unbelievable. I found the aliens fantastic though. I really liked the special effects. And the movie was entertaining fun. I thought it had less holes than Avatar, personally. And I’d like to see Disney make more films along these lines but they should remember to have good character arcs and fix easy plot holes.
My entire family saw John Carter and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. It was very entertaining!!! I loved it!!!!!!