260 replies to this topic

[NBooth]

Hmm. Looks like they revised the backstory--unless I'm forgetting something. Not that that's a problem, really.

[NBooth]

io9 has Keven Conran's video pitch from back when he was going to be doing the movie.

Is it just me, or does the Thark fight look like it's paying homage to The Golden Voyage of Sinbad?

Edited by NBooth, 16 January 2012 - 07:16 PM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Hmmm, what happened the LAST time Disney adapted an Edgar Rice Burroughs tale...?

[NBooth]

More footage. With less fighting and more talking.

And, you know, as much as I like this stuff, I can't help thinking that we've now seen three different versions of how the movie could play out--as a melancholy adventure, as a cookie-cutter actioner,and (now) as a kind-of-jokey swashbuckler. There doesn't seem to be a strong attempt to give a coherent idea of the movie.

EDIT: Here's an embeddable version:

Edited by NBooth, 02 February 2012 - 06:15 PM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

[NBooth]

Something looks weird in the first part of the second clip, there....

Come to think of it, what is Matai Shang doing commanding a bunch of Tharks? I don't remember that from the books. The races of Mars are pretty antagonistic to each other.

Edited by NBooth, 15 February 2012 - 10:24 PM.

[Timothy Zila]

NBooth, on 15 February 2012 - 10:21 PM, said:

[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2wBCYyeN9Q"]http://www.youtube.c...h?v=Q2wBCYyeN9Q[/url]
[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9PpYAPsE64"]http://www.youtube.c...h?v=G9PpYAPsE64[/url]

Something looks weird in the first part of the second clip, there....

Come to think of it, what is Matai Shang doing commanding a bunch of Tharks? I don't remember that from the books. The races of Mars are pretty antagonistic to each other.

Is it just me or aren't these clips the best look at the film we've had so far?


The film is finally looking good after pretty mediocre trailers. Hopefully Stanton has pulled it off.

[NBooth]

Timothy Zila, on 16 February 2012 - 12:38 AM, said:

Is it just me or aren't these clips the best look at the film we've had so far?

Yeah, it's like Disney finally realized that no one really recognizes Burroughs anymore outside of Tarzan. The featurette goes to great pains to point out that Star Wars etc all owe a great deal to the Barsoom books.

Not sure how that'll influence people who have already disregarded the movie as a rip-off, but yeah.

Quote

The film is finally looking good after pretty mediocre trailers. Hopefully Stanton has pulled it off.

I'm on such a roller-coaster at this point about the movie that I'm thinking of giving up any anticipation for good or ill.

[NBooth]

Deadline: "Could be biggest write-off of all time."

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Hollywood is in a tizzy over the early tracking which just came online this morning for Walt Disney Studios‘ John Carter opening March 9th. “Not good. 2 unaided, 53 aware, 27 definitely interested, 3 first choice,” a senior exec at a rival studio emails me. Another writes me, ”It just came out. Women of all ages have flat out rejected the film. The tracking for John Carter is shocking for a film that cost over $250 million. This could be the biggest writeoff of all time.” I’m hearing figures in the neighborhood of $100 million. And the studio isn’t even trying to spin reports of the 3D pic’s bloated budget any more.

Yikes. Can't say I'm surprised, though; if you're gonna sink $250 million into a film---unless it's a sure thing---you had better promote the heck out of it for months in advance. Particularly if it's based on a seventy-some-odd years old book.

Meanwhile, here's a couple more clips and--ok, at long last, I'm warming to Woola:

Edited by NBooth, 17 February 2012 - 11:48 AM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Heh. Screenwriter Peter Briggs links to this Movieline story and says: "Read the last paragraph. Now go read the rest of the article. Writing a treatment for the next movie, despite not having had a script that works for this one!?? Throw the door open, Andrew. That horse has firmly bolted...."

That last paragraph: "But while nobody’s talking yet in definitive terms about sequels, Stanton’s already prepared to continue; he’s already outlined a full trilogy, filtering the entire John Carter saga down from eleven books, and last week delivered a 25-page outline for the first sequel."

Then, jumping back to the beginning, and eventually getting to paragraph five: "That said, Stanton and producer Lindsey Collins confirmed that the process of hammering out the John Carter story was a long and laborious one even after a first cut of the film was submitted. Collins, a Pixar producer who worked with Stanton on WALL-E, described it as a learning process for translating the Pixar way of doing things into huge-scale live-action filmmaking – first working out the basics, then moving around the pieces until a satisfying film falls into place."

Then, a few paragraphs later: "As reported by THR, even after putting together a first cut Stanton was rewriting major character arcs and story sequence. The lead female character of Martian princess Dejah Thoris, played by actress Lynn Collins, wasn’t quite as strong initially as she is in the final cut, according to producer Collins. Stanton then rearranged key character reveals and scenes — nothing new or shocking to any filmmaking process, live-action or otherwise, but a process that could become incredibly demanding of resources if story was still being hammered out after principal photography."

[NBooth]

That's certainly in line with Stanton's previous statements about his, um, method.

Other stuff [emphasis mine]:

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The film’s title, for one, was changed from John Carter of Mars to John Carter to avoid too much of a science fiction/genre association to general audiences,

Quote

but the truncated title now leaves those unfamiliar with the Burroughs book scratching their heads wondering what John Carter is about. Despite a great initial trailer, subsequent spots have lent too much of a Star Wars feel to the proceedings, and the studio is scrambling to convey that the John Carter of Mars tale isn’t derivative of many of the genre properties of the last few decades, but is in fact the series that spawned many of them.

I've been saying they need to do this this since last July. It's absolutely mind-boggling to me that Disney is only just realizing that they need to be giving folks some kind of idea what the movie is. Surely the marketers there don't live in some sort of nerd Utopia where everyone automatically recognizes classic (or, at least, influential) s.f. whenever it's mentioned.

Edited by NBooth, 18 February 2012 - 02:06 AM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

NBooth, on 16 January 2012 - 07:06 PM, said:

io9 has Keven Conran's video pitch from back when he was going to be doing the movie.

Here's an embeddable version:

[NBooth]

Yahoo!UK has a five-minute clip.

EDIT: And now embeddable:



Predictably, it's a version of the most Attack of the Clones-sy segment from the trailers, so it won't put anyone's minds at ease on that score. Although I dig the way the chain is used i/r/t Carter's jumps.

Edited by NBooth, 25 February 2012 - 01:19 AM.

[Ryan H.]

STAR WARS parallels aside, it's just too cartoon-y for my tastes. None of that CGI work seems to have any real weight to it.

Part of me wishes that JOHN CARTER OF MARS had been made in the 80s as an enormous epic in the wake of other 80s fantasy/sci-fi films like LEGEND, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, EXCALIBUR, and DUNE.

[NBooth]

Ryan H., on 24 February 2012 - 07:40 PM, said:

STAR WARS parallels aside, it's just too cartoon-y for my tastes. None of that CGI work seems to have any real weight to it.

Well, some of it's excusable; John Carter himself shouldn't have any weight to him while he's bouncing around. Barsoom has much lower gravity. For the rest--yeah. It's still looking very cartoon-y.

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Part of me wishes that JOHN CARTER OF MARS had been made in the 80s as an enormous epic in the wake of other 80s fantasy/sci-fi films like LEGEND, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, EXCALIBUR, and DUNE.

With a soundtrack by Queen? I could live with that.

Edited by NBooth, 24 February 2012 - 08:55 PM.

[SDG]

FWIW, I saw the film earlier this week.

No comment about the film itself, but FWIW, I am now just beginning to read the novel, and only a few paragraphs into the prologue, my feelings about the interaction of the source material and the adaptation are … complicated.

[andrew_b_welch]

SDG, on 24 February 2012 - 09:34 PM, said:

FWIW, I saw the film earlier this week.

No comment about the film itself, but FWIW, I am now just beginning to read the novel, and only a few paragraphs into the prologue, my feelings about the interaction of the source material and the adaptation are … complicated.

Not to get all Star Wars-sy, but, "I've got a bad feeling about this."

[NBooth]

SDG, on 24 February 2012 - 09:34 PM, said:

FWIW, I saw the film earlier this week.

No comment about the film itself, but FWIW, I am now just beginning to read the novel, and only a few paragraphs into the prologue, my feelings about the interaction of the source material and the adaptation are … complicated.

I'll be interested to hear your thoughts. The novel's very diffuse, structurally, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's radically changed in adaptation. And, too, it's an E.R. Burroughs novel, so there's some problematic racial stuff that crops up here and there.

On another note, I just remembered that John Carter's initials are J.C. and the book ends with an empty tomb. Which means exactly nothing, but I'm surprised I didn't cotton on to it before.

[Overstreet]

NBooth, on 24 February 2012 - 08:55 PM, said:

With a soundtrack by Queen? I could live with that.

Or, even better... Yes.

Edited by Overstreet, 25 February 2012 - 02:14 AM.

[Timothy Zila]

Ryan H., on 24 February 2012 - 07:40 PM, said:

STAR WARS parallels aside, it's just too cartoon-y for my tastes. None of that CGI work seems to have any real weight to it.

Part of me wishes that JOHN CARTER OF MARS had been made in the 80s as an enormous epic in the wake of other 80s fantasy/sci-fi films like LEGEND, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, EXCALIBUR, and DUNE.

Maybe. But I have to say that shooting in actual locations as opposed to doing as much as possible in a green screen (i.e. the Star Wars prequels) seems like a good move. Also, for what it's worth, this is directed by ANDREW STANTON, a Pixar vet. If Stanton can bring that quality of animation and meld it with live action, I'll be impressed . . . and maybe, just maybe, that's been achieved here with John Carter.

Edited by Timothy Zila, 25 February 2012 - 02:38 AM.