Thursday, March 15, 2012

John Carter

I went to see the movie "John Carter" tonight with Patrick. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It should do better at the box office than it ultimately will, but that's because it's a textbook example of terrible marketing. I barely knew about the movie and it's supposed to be Disney's huge blockbuster franchise to replace "Pirates of the Caribbean". But with a name as generic as "John Carter", it's not surprising that it has eluded public conscienceness. Apparently some brilliant marketing people thought that if they kept the original title "John Carter of Mars" it would scare off the female demographic.

Interestingly enough, it's based off a novel written back in 1917 called "A Princess of Mars". You can tell that elements of it have inspired many science-fiction works since then.

It was a large series of novels, so I would suspect that the idea was that there would definitely be sequels. Hopefully they can make enough money to continue the series... and hopefully without the dedication to the memory of Steve Jobs at the end. What was that about?

2 comments:

  1. They dedicated to Steve Jobs because he isn't dead, he's a hero battling on Mars.

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  2. Don't worry Matt. Disney is the king of milking a franchise, even if only through direct to video. As for Steve Jobs, they criogenically froze him and put him next to Walt in the Disney vault.

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