John Carter Forum

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I should be John Carter's target audience, but all of Disney's marketing has made it look like a sub-par superhero-vs-aliens movie taking place in a vast, boring desert expanse. A bit too similar to Cowboys And Aliens, in other words. The trailers have seemed...respectful, perhaps, to the film, but didn't do much to excite me. I'm not going to claim that the fan trailer above, uploaded a week or so ago by a fan site for the film, necessarily changes my mind, but it at least tells the story of the film in a cogent manner, which is more than most of the official trailers can claim to have done.

Are you looking forward to John Carter? Does the trailer above change your opinions about it in any way?

I've been looking forward to this for some time now and this just fuels my excitement. This guy needs to be hired by Disney's marketing department ASAP.

Fire the marketing team and hire this guy.

Finally a trailer that got me interested in this movie.

Still not going to see it most likely since it looks utterly souless but hey good editing.

Wow, the two trailers could not be further apart in terms of quality. Can't wait to see the film now.

I don't understand how John Carter gets super powers

Then again, I don't get anything about this movie

Its impressive how much better this is to the real trailers, mostly because they focus more on Carter in earth than just showing pretty CGI action scenes...

I mean I am with you still feeling "meh" by the movie, but this trailer definitely got me more interested than the official ones...hm.

@lclay said:

I don't understand how John Carter gets super powers

Then again, I don't get anything about this movie

I think it's supposed to be a 'Mars has different gravity so human's are awesome there' type thing.

I just hope there's someone at Disney right now looking at this going "dang, that's good" and then slowly starting to contemplate updating their resume knowing that the real Carter trailers he/she have put together are absolute garbage. As they stare into the distance of Burbank they stop and think to themselves "why didn't I do that? I'm not good enough for this job".

I still think the first mistake Disney made was changing the title from "John Carter of Mars." If someone thought that "John Carter" was a more intriguing title, fire that person!

I've been interested in the film ever since the first trailer, and the subsequent trailers haven't dampened my interest one bit.

Riggins!!!

In March, get your ass to Mars.

@RockinKemosabe said:

I still think the first mistake Disney made was changing the title from "John Carter of Mars." If someone thought that "John Carter" was a more intriguing title, fire that person!

I tend to think that the title change was ordered after MARS NEEDS MOMS took a huge shit at the box office.

That's how Hollywood marketing works, unfortunately.

Mildly interesting is an overstatement. Not sure what that fan trailer is supposed to do for me that the other one didn't. Guess I'm not a fan of something that only exists in the wake of Avatar when Avatar wasn't an especially good film to begin with. White boy saves the tribe. Nah I'm good.

Call me a sucker, but I'm kind of looking forward to this. I have an IMAX Theater locally, and with Pixar on digital effects for the first time on a live action film, I'm excited. Only thing that looks iffy is Taylor Kitsch. I'm kind of hoping it does well, but I know it'll be a bomb ($300 million budget roughly, enough said).

@RockinKemosabe: I feel like it's got to be a weird rights thing or something. There's at least one John Carter comic coming out with Dynamite (not the Disney owned Marvel) called Warlord of Mars and I thought I heard about some other thing called John Carter of Mars by someone else... maybe even another comic under a different company, as the Dynamite book isn't technically using the John Carter license. Combine that with the fact that Dynamite is currently being sued by Burroughs' estate because of the "pornographic nature" of the Warlord of Mars book, Disney might've been trying to distance itself from that as well. It's also a film that seems to be taking itself fairly seriously, and calling it "John Carter of Mars" might sound a little too goofy.

But yeah, just "John Carter" is a dumb name. I swear, every time I've seen that trailer in a theater at least one person whispers "Who's John Carter?"

EDIT: Also, I didn't realize Stanton was directing. Wall-E and Nemo being two of my favorites of the Pixar movies, I'm infinitely more interested in this knowing he's involved.

It's been a long time since I read the books, but there was certainly potential for a franchise. Seems like maybe Disney is preparing to take a loss for tax purposes.

This trailer does two things that Disney has neglected completely; one, tell the premise of the whole damn thing in a coherent way, and two, push the "From the director of..." factor. I mean, Andrew Stanton is not a household name, but once people are reminded of what he's done, they'll pay attention. As for telling the premise of John Carter, it really is quite astounding how terrible most of the official trailers have been here (there's at least one that I really liked though, and sold me on it). Disney really is getting very, very bad at marketing these days - it's no wonder why films like Prince of Persia and Tron: Legacy underperform at the box office when Disney makes them look so lame.

The only thing I wish they had done in addition to all this would be to make a custom logo. "John Carter" is so fucking stupid; is Disney really assuming that THAT speaks for itself? At least "John Carter OF MARS" says that it's an adaptation of Princess of Mars, and has a cool (major) science fiction element. The bland desert environment really hurts the visuals of the movies; passing it off as Mars makes it seem somewhat more excusable. It even looks pretty cool in shots if you know what it's supposed to be. But it seems like all Disney cares about is hiding anything REMOTELY "sciencey", so dumbass midwestern people don't get scared off. That's the no.1 thing I fucking can't stand about the marketing of all this.

The movie is probably going to be great; that's the shame here. It's almost guaranteed to fail though. Unless it can repeat the same trick Avatar did of being fucking loathed until it actually came out, and then getting everyone to forget about it's terrible blue cat people designs and get onboard just to see what a 3D film looks like. Seriously - that's beyond unlikely. I can guarantee though that Disney has a better movie on their hands than fucking Avatar though. But NO movie is going to pull off that trick again.

Very interesting.