Friday, February 17, 2012

NEWS: John Carter of Huh?


It seems that John Carter - hero of the live-action adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's genre-defining science-fantasy novel, A Princess of Mars - may have an even bigger battle on his hands... Namely, with the audience...

According to Deadline, John Carter's early tracking shows a shockingly low level of awareness among its  potential audience, citing: “2 unaided, 53 aware, 27 definitely interested, 3 first choice.” Worse still the researchers also found ''women of all ages have flat-out rejected the film.''

Ironically, Disney decided against using the novel's title - A Princess of Mars - on the grounds that the ''of Mars'' suffix would not appeal to female audience members and that the word ''princess'' in the title would turn-off male viewers, hence the decision to go with the wonderfully unoffensive - and equally forgettable - John Carter. Which sounds way too close to Coach Carter. And last time I checked, nobody played Basketball on Barsoom...

Disney is optimistic that the movie's audience awareness levels will rise, stating that their marketing campaign is not yet fully underway. However, unless they can indeed raise the movie's profile, the company could be looking at a loss - according to Deadline's estimates - in excess of $100 million.

John Thing and... Stuff... Whatever... opens on March 9th in the US.

2 comments:

  1. The move to name this film 'John Carter' is one of the stupidest in movie marketing history. There are a million different things they could have named it to appeal to someone, anyone, but instead they chose the only title short of calling it 'Hey look, a movie' that appeals to absolutely no one.

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    1. I agree 100%. The name is meaningless to anybody who hasn't read the books and even if you have, chances are you won't think it's the adaptation of A Princess of Mars, because surely that's what they'd call it!

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