Everybody is talking about Disney’s John Carter. And not in a good way. It seems that everybody is talking about the project’s huge budget and poor marketing, with many news outlets taking an obscene amount of pleasure in declaring Andrew Stanton’s live action project dead on arrival. Some have even started making comparisons to Waterworld, another science-fiction epic with a huge budget that failed to find an audience. In the interest of honesty, I haven’t seen the film yet; I am cautiously optimistic, but I can’t help but worry about the film. Still, I can’t help but feel like this is an example of an hypocritical “damned if do, damned if you don’t” logic from film writers and journalists all over the web, who seem to be salivating at the prospect of a huge studio being humbled by a blockbuster that might mess up the landing. The irony being that these are probably the same people who frequently deride the “safe” and “obvious” choices for blockbuster films, bemoaning the fact that directors like Guillermo Del Toro aren’t given the budget to make the films they want to make.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Andrew Stanton, disney, Edgar Rice Burroughs, guillermo del toro, hollywood, John Carter, oscar, Princess of Mars, Tars Tarkas, Taylor Kitsch, The Walt Disney Company, willem dafoe | 6 Comments »