Salon.com > John Carter

Can Disney save “Star Wars”?

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 18:40:00 +0000

As some anonymous Wall Street dude explained to Sharon Waxman of The Wrap yesterday, the Walt Disney Co.’s blockbuster $4 billion purchase of Lucasfilm and the entire “Star Wars” franchise is best understood as a form of insurance – insurance against ever making “John Carter” again. Along with inspiring any number of humorous tweets and digital mashups of Mickey with a light saber or Princess Leia with mouse ears, the Disney-Lucas deal can both be described as a smart move, in the narrow sense, and also as an example of exactly what’s wrong with Hollywood. Today’s big players in the movie industry have grown so risk-averse and so focused on audience “pre-awareness” that it might be impossible for someone like the young George Lucas to emerge today.

When geniuses bomb

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Since when did “passion project” become such a dirty phrase?

When Andrew Stanton’s magnum opus "John Carter" was released just two short months ago, you’d think he had committed some kind of original sin. Just about every article or review dwelled on the fact that either A.) the film was going to lose a massive amount of money, or. B.) Disney was insane to entrust a massive studio blockbuster to some naïve “artist."

Talk about self-unfulfilling prophecy.

The history of Hollywood is littered with artists going one Bridge Too Far, a distinguished field of creative carnage that began with D.W. Griffiths’ "Intolerance." The story is simple. Having gathered their chips through some mega-success, deranged creative types bet their stack on a personal epic. "Jaws" begets "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," a win, and then, Steven Spielberg craps out on "1941." "The Godfather" gets topped by a sequel, but soon "Apocalypse Now" comes staggering from the jungle. Francis Ford Coppola was lucky enough to make it out of that casino, but then, had to return to Vegas for "One From The Heart," the opening act of the slow-motion dissolution of his career. And of course, there is Billy Wilder’s corrosive masterpiece, "Ace in the Hole," a cynical treasure that cost him most of the goodwill he had earned from the previous 10 years of commercial success. We won’t mention "Heaven's Gate," as that is too damn easy. But, I will say, deep inside Michael Cimino’s deranged epic there is something mesmerizing. It deserves to be taken on its own terms as an deranged vision, clearly made – if not made clearly -- by some kind of cinematic idiot savant.

Will “John Carter” rank among the all-time bombs?

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000

In considering the fate of "John Carter," the Disney studio's $250 million gamble on a Wild-West-goes-to-outer-space yarn that's 100 years old, it's tempting to observe that two of the biggest box-office bombs in recent Hollywood history have been movies set on Mars. With little sense that the barrage of worldwide publicity has built up much public appetite for "John Carter," is the Mouse prepared for No. 3?

You can't say Disney wasn't warned. One of those Martian elephant eggs was a quite recent Disney film, one the studio and the rest of us have done a good job forgetting. The execrable anti-feminist animated nightmare "Mars Needs Moms" came and went without much fuss a year ago, but viewed through a long lens it looks like one of the biggest disasters in film-industry history, piling up net losses in the ballpark of $140 million. The difference may have been that by the time "Mars Needs Moms" was released, Disney knew it was a turkey. Even at this writing, nobody knows quite what to expect from "John Carter," a long-long-brewing Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation that marks the live-action directing debut of Pixar's Andrew Stanton, director of "WALL-E" and "Finding Nemo."