Reddit Reddit reviews John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

We found 14 Reddit comments about John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood
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14 Reddit comments about John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood:

u/Adamino972 · 14 pointsr/fixingmovies

I loved it too! I highly recommend checking out the book John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood. Available on Kindle for free.

The author basically does a week by week analysis of the film's marketing campaign up to the release date to try and analyze/understand what went wrong to make this movie such a colossal flop. Super interesting!

u/Psyladine · 14 pointsr/movies

The book John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood goes a long way to redeem the picture. There are plenty of terrible movies that became successes for no good reason (Twilight...), but Carter specifically suffered under what is known as the changing of the guard.

Basically, the Disney head fired Dick Cook, who signed on the project. His replacement knows, if it was a hit, the credit goes to his predecessor. But, the studio had committed to making it for political reasons (Stanton and the Pixar knot). Part of the reason marketing botched it was a huge change of the guard, think replacing the marketing guys of 20 years with a hot 20 something all into social media. The experience and institutional drop is catastrophic by itself, but at the time Disney was also shifting away from its film division (which was never responsible for more than 8% of Disney Corp's total revenue), in part towards a shift of Disney buying preexisting properties and institutions, repackaging and selling them. In other words, the trend of corporate America from creating something to being a glorified middleman, and signaled by the acquisitions of Marvel and Star Wars.

So, JC is an elephant in the room where supporting it is mandated, but if it's a success, it undermines the new guard's overall strategy. The plan, then, becomes failure by neglect. Noone "wants" it to fail, it's just that noone particularly wants this obnoxious legacy pet project of a former chief and the wunderkind who got too big for his britches and had to make the leap from animation to live action, and basically they let him have enough rope to hang himself with.

Its failure validates the new agenda, lets them cut ties and scrap future projects by example, and got them out of the mess while being able to point at Dick Cook's foolhardiness as a 200 million writedown for the company.

Lastly: the movie isn't Oscar worthy, but its visual effects are second only to Avatar, which it had the misfortune of following. And being turned from a rated R 'original Conan the Barbarian, girls nude and bejeweled' style to a kiddie Star Wars extravaganza, which made doubly redundant when Disney bought Star Wars a little over a year later.

tl;dr: politics, man, politics.

u/jordanlund · 9 pointsr/scifi

I can only speak to the ones I've seen:

John Carter (2012) – Budget: $250 million. Gross: $284 million.

Really good movie, faithful to the original text and well executed. Terribly marketed. There's a book about how badly this was marketed:

John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood:
https://www.amazon.com/John-Carter-Hollywood-Michael-Sellers-ebook/dp/B00AFCZ1S4

Jupiter Ascending (2015) – Budget: $176 million. Gross: $184 million.

Heard horrible things about it but I never saw it. Signed up for HBO for Game of Thrones, I'll give it a spin.

Gods of Egypt (2016) – Budget: $140 million. Gross: $151 million.

Terrible. Just... GAK - not even Redbox worthy.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) – Budget: $177.2 million. Gross: $226 million.

Really good premise with decent source material and a proven writer/director. So what went wrong? Bad casting for the leads. Terrible acting, awful chemistry.

Somewhere along the line someone decided that these two were best represented by these two

Surly 14 year olds are not movie heroes. Well... unless you're targeting the Hunger Games crowd which might have been the goal.

Mortal Engines (2018) – Budget: $100 million. Gross: $102 million.

Much better than I thought it would be. I wasn't sold enough to drop money in the theater, but it's worth a watch on Redbox or Netflix or something. Hell, Hugo Weaving is worth it if nothing else.

u/Kewl0210 · 9 pointsr/boxoffice

I remember there was a book about what caused it to flop so hard, I'll see if I can find it...

Here it is: https://www.amazon.com/John-Carter-Hollywood-Michael-Sellers-ebook/dp/B00AFCZ1S4

Looks like it was mostly the marketing, but also they changed a bunch of stuff from the books to be more "formulaic", and it had all these production problems that got it bad press. The movie itself seems ok though.

u/TheWorldIsAhead · 7 pointsr/movies

Naming it John Carter was just one of many terrible ideas from marketing.

http://www.amazon.com/John-Carter-Hollywood-Michael-Sellers-ebook/dp/B00AFCZ1S4

u/screenavenger · 3 pointsr/movies
u/DG2736 · 3 pointsr/badMovies

It’s the reason why Disney didn’t want John Carter to be called “John Carter of Mars,” like it should have been (it died at the box office about as bad anyway).

A book on the Kindle store worth checking out if you’re interested at all in that story: https://www.amazon.com/John-Carter-Hollywood-Michael-Sellers-ebook/dp/B00AFCZ1S4

u/Captain_Midnight · 2 pointsr/movies

Sorry to see you getting downvoted, since the old executive in question literally wrote a book about the experience.

Edit: Granted, it's just one side of the story, but you're certainly not making things up.

u/lightbringer1979 · 2 pointsr/movies

John Carter shouldn't have flopped, but did so because of a variety of reasons, including poor marketing strategy. To learn more, check out [John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood] (http://www.amazon.com/John-Carter-Hollywood-Michael-Sellers-ebook/dp/B00AFCZ1S4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449727356&sr=1-1&keywords=john+carter+and+the+gods+of+hollywood)

It's an interesting read from a sincere fan of the John Carter book. But, Avatar was a successful movie by all accounts. James Cameron is a genius at building an immersive movie to a wide audience and he even created new technology to build this film. Another good book on James Cameron's approach to immersion, check out [The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories] (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Immersion-Generation-Remaking-Hollywood-ebook/dp/B004J35KQI/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449727746&sr=1-2&keywords=immersion+book)

Avatar was, by design, a 4 quadrant, international, immersive film. Individual tastes may vary, but this film was "universally" enjoyed...pardon the pun.

John Carter was an excellent adventure film, that did not advance the genre, but was an engaging film.

u/kowalski71 · 1 pointr/movies

There was a book written on the horrible marketing of John Carter. It's become like a Hollywood case study of failure.

u/WereAboutToArgue · 1 pointr/movies

While the movie has many faults, the marketing was criticized within the industry.

The marketing is a likely enough culprit that at least one book has been written about it.

u/Exostrike · 1 pointr/movies
u/CactusJ · 1 pointr/movies
u/dpunisher · 0 pointsr/movies

If you ever want to know how marketing can help tank a movie, this is a good read: http://www.amazon.com/John-Carter-Hollywood-Michael-Sellers-ebook/dp/B00AFCZ1S4