Oops! Apparently Disney has missed the mark somewhat with their John Carter movie. I think I know the problem: first, it’s called “John Carter”, and second, it’s based upon a series of novels from a century ago (!). So you’ve got two different reasons not to care already: boring character name; never heard of it. It’s a shame, but I believe this could have been avoided. How? A marketing strategy, of course!
Okay, I think I know what they were thinking here: “Hey, man: Star Wars was unknown when it was new too, so this will catch on! Just wait until they see it!” The difference is, Star Wars used never-before-seen special effects, and John Carter uses the same CGI motion capture stuff everyone has been doing for years at this point. Plus, Star Wars really had this whole Joseph Campbell mythological archetype stuff going on in a way we hadn’t really seen done before on an epic scale like that. But without that novelty of special effects wizardry, maybe most people wouldn’t have cared. But we’ve been seeing alien worlds and motion capture a lot by this point. Plus, the whole idea just seemed like old hat and ridiculously unrealistic, and with a really generic moniker to boot. But I still think it might have worked if…
If you’re a company like Disney, you have all sorts of avenues open to you to build brand identity. You could do a comic book series. You could have an animated TV series. You could release illustrated novellas. And then you could build up interest in John Carter like that (or else figure out nobody’s interested before you spent $350 Million!). See what I mean? If you got the kids interested through TV programming, you could do that whole Pokemon strategy (if people liked it). And if it didn’t catch on, then maybe you could just pack it in and forget the whole thing. But you see what I mean, right? Kids drag parents to movies, and then if it’s good, then everyone tells their friends. But if the kids don’t care about the movie, then they never drag anyone to go see it. See?
Now with something like Flash Gordon, most people know what that is. But John Carter? You really have to build your brand identity first before you can make a hit out of such an unfamiliar subject, and spending so much money on it is really questionable. Maybe this was Edgar Rice Borroughs’s revenge on movie studios of the future: nobody wanted anything of his but Tarzan, so he used such a boringly generic name for the main character to prove he could succeed, but that anyone who tried to adapt it would fail. And finally: revenge for people only liking Tarzan!
Disney also lost a pile of money on another motion-capture Mars-themed movie just last May: Mars Needs Moms. That’s two big losses in one year. But if there’s one company that can weather the storm without too much worry, it’s Disney. I’m not worried about them. (They’re one of the most intelligent and successful companies on Earth! And no, they didn’t offer me a job just now to get me to say that!) I just hope they learned their lesson. (That lesson being: don’t spend a king’s ransom on something you’re not sure of! And if you do, invest it where you’re sure it will pay off: at Pixar!)
Here’s the story on John Carter:
And here’s the story on Mars Needs Moms:
