Posted on 03/11/2012 1:32:54 PM PDT by jimbo123
-snip-
“John Carter,” a big-budget science fiction epic from Walt Disney Studios that opened Friday and flopped over the weekend. Disney spent lavishly (some say foolishly) on the movie in large part to keep one of its most important creative talents happy: Andrew Stanton, the Pixar-based director of “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E.”
“John Carter,” which cost an estimated $350 million to make and market, and was directed by Mr. Stanton, took in about $30.6 million at the North American box office, according to Rentrak, which compiles box-office data. That result is so poor, even when factoring in about $71 million in overseas ticket sales, that analysts estimate that Disney will be forced to take a quarterly write-down of $100 million to $165 million.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I think that special effects tend to eclipse a good story to its detriment.
Nice body “but her face” is bad...
I'm with you ... I'm sure I'll greatly enjoy this movie ... flop or not! :)
I’m the same way, I’ll enjoy it but I won’t pay theater prices for it.
Too bad. I loved the books when I was young.
Sir, YOU ROCK!
Ah. Found it. Thanks, mate.
The gunboats with the miniguns were cool as heck, though.
Sad that people choose to propagandize their children with environmentalist pap like ‘The Lorax’...
Digital effects, especially with digitally animated movies like Toy Story or movies like John Carter that have so many effects that they might as well be an animated movie, require huge investments of cash. You have to pay a very large number of extremely talented people large amounts of money to design very time consuming effects using very expensive machines and technology. The process from start to finish is several years, not months like shooting a traditional film.
Also, if you're using top voice talent as well like most animated and effects driven movies do, you have to fork over big bucks to them too. It's exponentially cheaper to pay Willem Dafoe to stand in front of the camera in a costume and act than to pay him to voice act for a digital character that takes dozens of people months to design and days per second of film to render and complete.
Digital effects take much longer hence their greater cost. Digital effects require a lot of very gifted people working for long periods of time, and they don't come cheap.
"Happy Feet" was even worse.
In watching the “Iron Sky” trailer I noted the “Sarah Palin-US President”-esque character, and couldn’t help thinking that although the Euros probably viewed her derisively, when the movie makes it to the US that character may turn out to be the best thing in the whole movie... /g
My biggest problem with this flick is that, unless you want to go at 10 O’Clock (AM or PM), you gotta go to either the 3D or the XD version, each of which has a $3-$4 “up charge” attached to it.
For matinee or Costco prices ($7.50), it might be worth it. “Regular price” ($11-$15), not so much.
Bush’s fault, anyway!
I went and saw the 2D version last night. I knew I had to go see it after the critics panned it.
The first bit on earth I was not impressed with. But man it picked up right after he woke up on Mars.
If you’re a fan of the books then you know they condensed the first three books into the Movie - Princess, Gods and Warlord of Mars.
If you’re not too picky about that you’ll see they did a pretty good job.
I’ll give it a thumbs up as a popcorn cruncher and will purchase the DVD when it comes out.
Uh-oh...now ya done it.
Watched the trailer. Dejah Thoris appeared to be overdressed... /g
OTOH, the poor numbers may be just an extension of Barry's "vision" of "America is back" (to the 1930's.)
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