Friday, March 23, 2012

THE RANT: ‘JOHN CARTER’s’ MASSIVE FALLOUT: Who’s to blame for Disney’s ‘$200-million’ bomb (THE RANT)



THE RANT: ‘JOHN CARTER’s’ MASSIVE FALLOUT: Who’s to blame for Disney’s ‘$200-million’ bomb By Michael Cavna

SOMETIMES BAD FLOPS happen to good people. Even those hideous, avert-your-eyes flops that cause you to question how so much talent can go to so much disgraceful waste. Amid the commercial carnage that follows the CGI blood-splatter, even Hollywood’s best coroners are sometimes stumped by the precise cause of staggering box-office death.

They walk away, shaking their heads, chalking it up to fickle audiences or muddled plots or who-knows-what-exactly? Commercial death comes, as it must, to all serial big-spenders backing gargantuan movies. But in the case of “John Carter,” it didn't have to be this way.

Disney still has its Imagineers. But where in the Martian world were the studio’s marketeers? “John Carter” may go down as one of Hollywood’s biggest movie flops ever. But it should rightly go down as one the town’s biggest marketing flops ever.

Did someone at the Mouse House dial the E.R. instead of PR? The Mouse House announced this week that it anticipates that “John Carter” — its new film about Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Civil War “Martian” — will “book a loss of $200 million” for the quarter. Meaning in Hollywood dollars, it’s on track to be one of the biggest money-losing ka-booms ever. “John Carter” had grossed nearly $190-mill globally as of last weekend — but had a whopping production budget of about $250-million, plus its $100-million marketing price tag, the AP reports.


READ WHAT MAY HAVE GONE WRONG:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/the-rant-john-carters-massive-fallout-whos-to-blame-for-disneys-200-million-bomb/2012/03/19/gIQAOKf6VS_blog.html


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