‘John Carter’ Has Disastrous Opening Weekend; ‘The Lorax’ Stays Atop The Box Office
After being taken to the woodshed just last spring with Mars Needs Mom ($21 million on a $150 million budget), Disney now has to contend with a disastrous $30.6 million opening weekend for Andrew Stanton’s sci-fi fantasy John Carter. The $250 million investment, an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs “A Princess of Mars” has had dismal tracking for weeks but nothing can prepare you for getting your head handed to you by The Lorax, Universal’s holdover which is easily staying atop the box office for a second week in a row with a $39.1 million weekend.
The studio will likely have to take a massive $100+ million write-down despite the fact that the movie is actually performing fairly well abroad, hauling in $70.6 million from 55 territories, including Russia where it had the biggest opening day in the country’s history. As feared, John Carter didn’t appeal to its target demographic of young males with 59% of the audience being older than 25. Word-of-mouth is healthy with a “B+” CinemaScore but there is virtually no hope that the movie will recover with 21 Jump Street coming next week and most notably The Hunger Games releasing in two weeks.
So where did it all go wrong? No doubt, everything starts with the gargantuan budget which ballooned to something close to $250 million. How could a movie with virtually no star power and being adapted from unproven material a century old become that expensive? And then, there is the ridiculously ineffective marketing which stubbornly stuck to the action-adventure premise of the film and made it appear as an incredibly generic blend of Avatar and Star Wars.
John Carter wasn’t the only bomb of the weekend. Eddie Murphy who is quickly becoming nothing short of a box office embarrassment, highlighted A Thousand Words, a comedy which has been sitting on the shelf since 2008 before being released. The movie claimed a dismal $6.4 million and may well be on its way to earn itself an illustrious 0% Rotten Tomatoes score.
Finally, the Elizabeth Olsen-starring horror movie Silent House also had a disappointing $7 million opening weekend. But consider the tiny $1 million budget and it doesn’t look nearly as bad. However, audiences absolutely despised the movie, giving it the dreaded “F” CinemaScore.
Weekend Box Office |
|
|---|---|
| 1. Iron Man 3 | $72.5M |
| 2. The Great Gatsby | $51.1M |
| 3. Pain and Gain | $5.0M |
| 4. Tyler Perry Presents Peeples | $4.5M |
| 5. 42 | $4.7M |
| 6. Oblivion | $3.9M |
| 7. The Croods | $3.6M |
| 8. The Big Wedding | $2.5M |
| 9. Mud | $2.3M |
| 10. Oz The Great and Powerful | $0.8M |
17 Comments
Happy to see the Lorax still going strong, for HFD points of course
And Efron still has like 4 other movies coming out this year 
Not surprising that The Lorax stayed on top since it has virtually no competition and had a really strong opening weekend.
LOL, I don’t think anyone (including Disney) was surprise that John Carter tanked so bad. So much for Taylor Kitsch being the next big thing, he still has Battleship coming this summer. Oh wait that one will probably tank too, oops!
Heck, Avatar was huge but is Sam Worthington the next big thing? Some actors have “it”, I mean it’s pretty obvious Kitsch doesn’t.
I don’t think he has much charisma when I saw him in Wolverine. I wonder that if they had a different (read: better) lead actor if this would perform a bit better.
The marketing for this was terrible. The minute I saw the full length trailer, I wanted take backs on my pick of Taylor Kitsch in the Hollywood draft. LOL.
Some bad, bad stuff.
In general, its been a weak year for movies so far. Not that the first quarter is usually loaded with goodies or anything. But thank god we have such a loaded summer to look forward to…
Well, it’s like that every year, the January to April period usually has only a handful of decent movies and the rest are just being dumped by studios.
Another Anomalous Material prediction comes true. The funny thing is, the reviews have been pretty good. Not great, but I expected a nearly universal thrashing from critics.
Yea it’s around the 50% mark on Rotten Tomatoes so almost perfectly mixed
I mean you can see these kind of box office busts from a long way. Very few movies with such a huge budget manage to breakeven. Then you add the terrible marketing and tepid overall buzz and this was doomed pretty much from the start.
I am not surprised. Even though i did actually enjoy John Carter $250m is a ridiculous budget that would feed an entire country!
Yea just a case of Disney not being able to say no to the director. A movie budget should never go this high!
Like Fogs mentioned, the marketing on John Carter was inexcusably atrocious. Nobody should be surprised to see the movie tank on opening weekend in the domestic market. The Lorax, on the other hand, has enjoyed a far stronger marketing campaign, and is just an easier sell on its own merits.
Yuppers.
It’s pretty sad that despite all the evidence pointing to a terrible opening weekend, Disney did absolutely nothing in terms of new marketing initiatives. They kept trying to push the action/adventure/monsters and aliens aspects of the movie over and over again.
They should have stuck with Of Mars and sold it as what it is– the story that helped give birth to those recognizable franchises we see in its worlds and action and characters. Instead they’ve presented it as something really rote and generic when the marketing should have been all about saying, “Hey, guys, if you like Star Wars or Superman or Avatar, you really should check out John Carter of Mars– that story’s basically the great great grandfather of all of those franchises!” (Though in a more succinct and punchy way.)
This stings, it really does, it stings. I knew knew knew JOHN CARTER was gonna underperform like mad, it was inevitable based on the way marketing has been handled and that rather massive budget amount [to be fair, every shot pretty much shows you where that money went], but this sucks sooo much.
JOHN CARTER OF MARS (as it deserves to be called) deserved better. It deserved to open massively and be as successful as the POTC franchise, because this world, this universe created by Burroughs and brought to life by Stanton, definitely friggin’ DESERVE it. I was engulfed by the imagination and vast Mars culture the film gave, and it’s a pity that I won’t see that continued past these 135 minutes. Disney you disappoint me.
Poor John Carter…but it serves them right for spending so much money!
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