When You Wish Without A Star

John Carter... fantastic movie, dismal box office, at least in the US.  Disney/Pixar's first live-action movie attempt scored way below their expectations and prompted the firing of at least one studio executive.

Conan The Barbarian (2011)... a decent attempt at relaunching the franchise, but also a box office failure.

Both studios had high hopes for these films.  What went wrong?  John Carter was the victim of an extremely poor advertising campaign that targeted kids and not the pulp/sci-fi/action buffs that were familiar with the books.  The Disney cable channels bombarded their commercial time with shots of smiling aliens, John Carter jumping really high and running around with his space dog.  Everyone I know that was not a die-hard fan just thought it looked stupid.

Conan's producers should have planned on a more marketable movie and cut a few scenes of gore and nudity so that they could grab the PG-13 rating instead of R.  This limited the intended audience, right out of the gate.

However, the biggest problem that both movies had was that they had absolutely NO STAR POWER!  Both title characters were practically unknowns.  This is a BIG gamble to bet so much money on (Conan cost $90 million, while John Carter's budget was a reported $250 million!!!)  Even the supporting characters were mostly unknown.  In Carter, you had Taylor Kitsch as the title character, there was Mark Strong as a bad guy and voice-overs by Willem Dafoe and Thomas Hayden Church, but you didn't see those last 2 on screen, so it doesn't count.  As far as Conan, Nobody outside of Stargate or Game of Thrones fans had ever heard of Jason Momoa.  I can't stress enough how huge of a mistake this was.  Admittedly, if either had worked, the executives involved would have been labeled as geniuses, but, alas, it didn't happen.

Conan was a slightly above average action flick, but John Carter was quite spectacular.  Fans of the books were very pleased.  There were few complaints from anyone who actually went and saw it.  There is a fan-made trailer for Carter that really helps boost interest in the film.  If only Disney had hired those guys to help promote it.  I showed it to some of the naysayers and they immediately had a 180 degree impression of the movie and wanted to rush out and see it.  I'll try to include it below.

From BoxOfficeMojo.com
Conan The Barbarian (2011)  Cost: $90 mil  Domestic Box Office: $21.2 mil
John Carter   Cost: $250 mil   Domestic Box Office: $70.7 mil

Both actually did better overseas, but that was in ALL foreign markets combined.

So.. When you film without a star, it makes no difference what studio you are....

Avengers Assembled

Highest opening weekend ever!  Well how about that.  Putting aside my usual quips about the Writer/Director, I'll talk some about The Avengers movie (I'm sorry, Marvel's The Avengers.  Wouldn't want to confuse it with that British TV series or the horrible motion picture based on it.).
All the players are there.  Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Nick Fury, Black Widow, Hawkeye and even the 3rd generation Bruce Banner/Hulk, this time portrayed by Mark Ruffalo.
So, Loki is on the loose and he's got his hands on the "Cosmic Cube" or Tesseract.  He's ready to open a portal to lead an alien army through to Earth and "free humanity from freedom" (paraphrasing), whatever that means.  Nick Fury brings together our heroes to save the world.
The team is pretty dysfunctional at first and there are a lot of arguments and in-fighting but they eventually manage to pull it together to unite against the common enemy.  The actors really bring the dialogue and banter to life and Robert Downey, Jr. manages to steal the scene just about every time he appears on-screen.  He's really nailed the Tony Stark persona.  All the characters manage to get fairly equal screen-time, and the action sequences keep things moving.
Overall, the movie actually does live up to the hype and Marvel just keeps marching forward.  Iron Man 3, which starts shooting within the next month, is slated for 5/3/13, Thor 2 for 11/15/13 and Captain America 2 is down for 4/4/14 (these are confirmed dates from Marvel, though subject to change).  This would probably put a follow-up to The Avengers at May of 2015, if they keep their current release formula.  As for The Incredible Hulk, Marvel has hinted that they may be looking at returning him to the small screen as an on-going series (queue sad, walking away music).  Whether or not they would get Ruffalo to portray him, or yet another actor, remains to be seen.

Other Marvel movie news: The Amazing Spider-man relaunch/reboot is out this summer with a release date for part 2 already announced.  Fox has a "use it or lose it" deal on the X-men and Fantastic Four properties so The Wolverine is in pre-production but no word on the FF other than they want to reboot it as well.  Marvel has also indicated that they would like to bring out some of their lesser known characters in lower budget films, one of which is Doctor Strange which I believe would be interesting (although they did produce a really bad version of him back in the 70's and Paramount/Full Moon Entertainment had a knock-off character called Doctor Mordrid back in the 80's).  There are even a few other characters that are in early development for possible TV shows.  We'll just have to wait and see...