Of course, $70 million of "John Carter" box office revenues came in from foreign markets. The movie is doing better overseas than in the United States. For example, it had the fourth best opening weekend ever in Russia. Box office sales in Europe are weaker than hoped for but Asian markets (excluding Japan and China) and Australia proved to be very successful for "John Carter". Still, if you're getting your film news from The Hollywood Reporter you might have the impression that "John Carter" is a dismal bomb.
But do dismal box office bombs really bring in $100 million on their opening weekends? Even "Green Lantern" needed 4 months to earn back $200 million. But let's not quibble over facts. The sad truth is that the Disney Company failed to figure out how to market "John Carter" to the right audience.
According to my informal research, the most positive responses to "John Carter" have been coming from young women and families -- supposedly the demographic among test audiences that rejected the film. The young women like Taylor Kitsch. But families? That's hard to fit in with the story that some news organizations have been trying to sell.
Several quick scans of Twitter for responses to the movie this weekend revealed that positive, supportive statements outnumbered the negative statements. However, most of the negativity was coming from film reviewers and news media Twitter accounts promoting their hare-brained stories about how "John Carter" was failing at the box office.
To hide their embarrassment at being WRONG about the film, many US news organizations wrote doubtful stories on Friday suggesting that "John Carter" might only tie "The Lorax" for opening Friday box office sales (in fact, "John Carter" outperformed "The Lorax"). Estimates for the weekend take quickly dropped to $24-27 million. Of course, as Saturday sales for "John Carter" surged the news media grudgingly conceded that Carter was performing better than expected; and yet, they were happy to report that "The Lorax" would take number 1 for the weekend after all.
There is no question that Universal out-maneuvered Disney in promoting "The Lorax" ahead of "John Carter". If you saw any movies in an AMC Theater over the past few weeks you undoubtedly saw the Lorax (voiced by Danny DeVito) in AMC's pre-film "Please Be Quiet During the Movie" promo. Disney, on the other hand, imposed a 2-year embargo on news media interviews with actors and writers for "John Carter".
Former Disney marketing VP MT Carney resigned and left the company a couple of months ago, but not before her brilliant marketing campaign virtually ensured that "John Carter" would be torpedoed at the box office. She completely misread the audience and failed to understand that you MUST reach out to science fiction and fantasy audiences well in advance of a film's release to get their support for the movie.
But the real fault lies with Disney CEO Robert A. Iger, who clearly doesn't know how to handle genre films. He needs to change his errant ways or Disney needs to get out of the genre movie business. I don't care how successful "Pirates of the Caribbean" turned out to be -- Disney had a huge audience cache with that movie franchise simply because of the popularity of the theme park ride which inspired it. That equates to a LOT of advanced audience engagement.
When you take a 100-year-old story like "John Carter of Mars" and turn that into a movie, you need to build up audience expectations well in advance of release of the film. You have to deal with complaints from purists who grew up with the story but you also have to introduce a younger generation to the books and help popularize the characters and the ideas that go into updating the story for a modern audience. You have to distance yourself from the past and position yourself for the future.
In short, if Disney somehow manages to climb out of the perception hole into which it dug itself with bad decision making -- that is, if "John Carter" makes enough money in spite of the bad press and bad marketing -- Mr. Iger needs to take away a valuable lesson from this experience. He needs to see that there are indeed millions of viewers out here who will gladly support a well-made film franchise, but we have to be taken seriously. As anyone who has read my review of "John Carter" knows, I think it's a very good movie. Most of the people who have seen seem to agree with me. Unfortunately, idiots in the news media are trying to dress up the positive audience response with insults and derision. Supposedly, the people in Russia are easily fooled by special effects, as if they don't have a long established history in literature and film-making.
Here's hoping the audiences prove the pundits wrong -- again.
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