It won't be a good opening weekend for Disney's John Carter. Rumored to cost $250 million dollars before marketing and advertising, John Carter opened yesterday on 3,749 screens and could only take in $9,818,000.
By comparison, Universal's Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, which has already been in theaters for one week, earned $9,600,000 last night.
If you play out Friday's box office estimates, the weekend forecast for John Carter will clock in somewhere between $26 million to $30 million dollars. Getting the movie to cross the $100 million dollar domestic threshold will almost certainly be impossible.
Is John Carter's weak box office the result of poor marketing decisions by Disney? Has the source material been plucked clean, and so audiences weren't attracted to it? Is it a fault of the casting? The wrong time of year to release? Or is it a combination of all of these factors plus more?
The weekend box office estimates will be released tomorrow morning, and they will be up here on Coming Attractions along with more analysis.
I called it, back when they renamed it from John Carter of Mars to just John Carter. I said they must like less box office, because that is exactly what they got. Why the HELL would you take Mars out of the title??? Don't want the audience to actually know what the movie is about?
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emanthia
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Posted: 13 years 1 week ago
In answer to your question, I believe it's all of the above. BAD marketing, BAD script, WRONG director, BAD casting, and a BAD release date.
In other words, it followed a formula that's as outdated as beepers.