John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

The perceived failure of Andrew Stanton's John Carter dominates any talk of the film itself.  I say "perceived" because the film was the victim of studio politics and ineptitude.  It was easier to bury studio mistakes and move on than it was for Disney to take responsibility for the debacle.  And while I am not a fan of Andrew Stanton's Wall-E, Stanton is, perhaps, the biggest victim of how the release of the film was handled.

Michael D. Sellers has cataloged all the missteps in his book, John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood.  A fan of the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, he covers the writing of the original novel, A Princess of Mars, and Burroughs interactions with Hollywood, predominantly on the Tarzan films.

Animator Bob Clampett was the first one to attempt to turn the John Carter stories into film, albeit animated.  While Clampett produced samples, he was unable to find a backer for the series.  At various times, Ray Harryhausen, Disney, and Paramount were interested in the property, but while scripts were written, nothing was produced.

Andrew Stanton first became a fan of John Carter though Marvel's comics adaptations.  When the rights became available, he was working on Wall-E and asked Dick Cook, Disney Studios chief, if could direct it as his next project.  Cook secured the rights.  As Stanton moved onto the project, two questionable decisions were made: setting the budget at $250 million and not casting stars.

Shortly after the budget was set, Dick Cook was out at Disney.  It's common in Hollywood for projects to be orphaned when executives are fired.  In this case, given Stanton's importance, it was impossible to cancel the project, but Cook's replacement, Richard Ross, was not enthusiastic. 

Neither was Robert Iger, who fired Cook.  Iger's pattern is to buy established franchises like Marvel and Lucasfilm rather than spend the money to develop franchises in-house.  In fact, at the time Cook was giving John Carter a green light, Iger was negotiating to buy Marvel, which would give Disney a line-up of characters all better known to the public than John Carter.  And while John Carter was in production, Iger was negotiating with George Lucas for the purchase of the Star Wars franchise, one that would give Disney a much higher profile space adventure than John Carter. 

While the studio was willing to allocate a standard marketing budget for the film, it was not willing to spend more.  Given the risks associated with the production budget, this could be seen as prudent or foolish.  In addition, once Ross was in place, he hired a new director of marketing, MT Carney, who had no experience marketing films.  What made it worse is that she was fired before John Carter was released, so there was little continuity in the marketing campaign.

Months went by without marketing activity for the film.  The release date was moved from summer to March, which raised questions as to whether the film was strong enough to compete with summer blockbusters.  "Of Mars" was dropped from the title, leaving the very generic sounding John Carter.   The budget began to attract attention, the implication being that costs were out of control. Stanton's interviews implied that he was less comfortable with live action production than animation, which didn't help the perception that the film was over-budget.  In reality he held to the budget, including 18 days of reshoots.

For the March release, the film's main competition would be The Hunger Games.  Sellers shows how that film trounced John Carter in creating audience awareness prior to release. 

The film did not open with enough box office to suggest it would be profitable, but only 10 days into the release, Disney publicly declared the film a failure and indicated that it would write off $200 million on it.  It's unusual for a studio to abandon a film while it is still in release domestically and yet to open all around the world.  Sellers explanation is that Richard Ross made the announcement early so that it would be old news by the time Iger next had to meet with the financial press for the quarterly earnings report.  It also attached the failure to Richard Ross, who Iger was about to replace. In total, the three executives most responsible for producing and marketing the film -- Dick Cook, MT Carney and Richard Ross -- were all fired.  Stanton was sent packing back to Pixar.

Sellers is scrupulous about his statistics and quotes, but less scrupulous when it comes to his own involvement.  While he admits to being a Burroughs fan in the introduction, it isn't until the second half of the book that he reveals that he is the proprietor of www.thejohncarterfiles.com, a fan site that collected information about the film prior to its release.  He also cut a fan trailer that received a lot of praise for being better than the official trailers and he met with Disney, hoping to involve himself in the film's marketing but was rebuffed.  While there is no question about the facts surrounding John Carter, Sellers actions do raise questions about his motives for writing the book.  He is not a dispassionate reporter but a spurned fan.  Is the book reportage or revenge?

Ultimately, John Carter fell victim to three problems: a budget that made it difficult for the film to be profitable; source material that seemed old hat after influencing other science fiction projects; and a major changing of the guard and focus at Disney's film studio.

Andrew Stanton brought his first live action film in on budget, a major accomplishment considering the difficult logistics of the project, but the merits of the film couldn't overcome the aforesaid problems.  Sellers has written a textbook for all the things that can go wrong off a movie set that ultimately affect the success of a film.  John Carter isn't unique, just the latest Hollywood film to be mismanaged and cast aside.

In Light of Finding Nemo 2...

...I'd like to point you to a post, now a year old, called "Growth, Maturity and Decline."  My impression is that Pixar is done.  That doesn't mean that they won't make the occasional film that is exceptional, but the initial energy that propelled the company creatively is gone.  It was inevitable;  they are now predictable.  In terms of the previous article, they are a mature company.  The question now is when does the studio enter its decline?  This is not a criticism of the company so much as it is a sad observation.

Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton

I never saw Brad Bird's Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and I won't be seeing Andrew Stanton's John Carter. The analyst in me is still interested in the contrast between the two.

Brad Bird
Made a sequel to a successful franchise
The film starred one of the few actors who can still "open" a film
Made a film that had similarities to his animated film The Incredibles

Andrew Stanton
Made a film based on a 100-year-old book with no preceding movie
The film starred someone who has never before received top billing in a feature
Made a film that was not similar to his animated films Finding Nemo and Wall-E.

John Carter is being touted as a flop that may not hit $30 million for its opening weekend. While Bird emerged from Mission Impossible as somebody who is bankable in both animation and live action, Stanton is already being declared a live action failure. I found this paragraph from Deadline Hollywood interesting. I have no idea how valid it is, but the fact that this is the perception in at least part of Hollywood doesn't bode well for Stanton's future in live action. The ellipses are in the original; the paragraph is quoted verbatim.

"To summarize: this flop is the result of a studio trying to indulge Pixar… Of an arrogant director who ignored everybody’s warnings that he was making a film too faithful to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first novel in the Barsoom series “A Princess of Mars”… Of the failure of Dick Cook, and Rich Ross, and Bob Iger to rein in Stanton’s excessive ego or pull the plug on the movie’s bloated budget … Of really rotten marketing that failed to explain the significant or scope of the film’s Civil War-to-Mars story and character arcs and instead made the 3D movie look way as generic as its eventual title… Disagree all you want, but Hollywood is telling me that competent marketing could have drawn in women with the love story, or attracted younger males who weren’t fanboys of the source material. Instead the campaign was as rigid and confusing as the movie itself, not to mention that ’Before Star Wars, Before Avatar‘ tag line should have come at the start and not at the finish. But even more I think John Carter is a product of mogul wuss-ism as much as it is misplaced talent worship. More detail to come."

Deadline Hollywood is not the only one examining John Carter's box office failure. The N.Y. Times wades in as well.

Toy Story 3: Some thoughts

(There are mild spoilers below.)

Watching Toy Story 3, I think I'm getting a clearer understanding of Andrew Stanton's contribution to Pixar. While most people are comparing the latest Toy Story to the two previous films, it seems to me that the new Toy Story relates most closely to Finding Nemo and Wall-E, two films directed by Stanton. Stanton is listed as one of the writers on the latest Toy Story.

Toy Story 3 resembles Nemo in that it is about moving to a new stage of life, where old relationships cannot stay the same. Marlin has to loosen his grip on Nemo in order for Nemo to grow. Andy has to let go of his childhood in order to become an adult; the toys have to accept that their time with Andy is over. Both films (and many of the Pixar features Stanton has contributed to) deal with separation.

Stanton was adamant about Wall-E not being an ecological fable, yet Toy Story 3 takes the characters to a dump, an endless stretch of society's garbage. It's the kind of place that Wall-E would work. Clearly somebody at Pixar is uncomfortable with the detritus cast off by our consumer society, and based on Wall-E, I'm guessing that it's Stanton. I wonder, too, if it isn't a subversive cry from the heart, disdaining the endless merchandising that Disney grinds out in the wake of Pixar's creations.

At some point, I very much hope that somebody writes a book about the Pixar brain trust similar to John Canemaker's book on the nine old men. While most of the attention has focused on John Lasseter, I suspect that others in the company have had an enormous effect on the shape of the films. Cars, directed by Lasseter without contributions from Stanton or the late Joe Ranft, is the least interesting Pixar feature for me. I think Wall-E is a mess, but at least there are ideas in it; Cars is hollow. I'm looking forward to John Canemaker's book on Joe Grant and Joe Ranft for learning more about Ranft. I wonder if Stanton and Pete Docter will ever come out from behind the Pixar public relations machine to emerge as individuals. We may have to wait until they are retired or dead before people are willing to speak openly.

I found Michael Sporn's comments on the film interesting. I agree with him, but I think what Toy Story 3 is was inevitable. I can't remember if I wrote about this for this blog or for Apatoons, but there is a difference between character and personality. In a single dramatic work, characters change. They start in one emotional place and at the end, the events of the plot cause them to grow into something else. However, as soon as characters are used repeatedly, whether it's for sequels or series, they can no longer change without threatening the aspects that have made them popular with audiences. They are reduced to personalities -- a collection of traits to be trotted out for the audience's satisfaction. Homer Simpson can never really learn anything, or if he learns something it has to be forgotten by the start of the next episode. If he does change, he's no longer Homer Simpson.

The Toy Story characters have become personalities due to their sequels and the forthcoming shorts. As a result, changes have to be superficial, like Spanish Buzz. That's not growth, it's a quirk. The only characters who really change in this film are Andy and Ken. It's a shame that Andy is dropped from the film when he discovers that his toys have been donated. There's no sense that he's upset or conflicted. He doesn't attempt to recover the toys. It's only at the end that we get any insight into his thoughts and while they're poignant, I think the film missed an opportunity by not giving him more screen time, especially since he seems to be written out of the series. That provided a real opportunity to take Andy in new directions without hurting the franchise.

I wonder if Pixar will receive any flak from the gay community over Ken, not due to how he acts but how other characters react to him. The bookworm's reaction to seeing the high heels and the toys' reaction to his handwriting are less than generous. Still, Ken is one of the few characters in this film who grows, coming out of the closet by going into his closet.

Is there anyone making films now, live or animated, who relies as heavily on sentiment as Pixar? I've stopped following Hollywood films for the most part, but I'm guessing the answer is no. Pixar is clearly filling an audience need, one that Hollywood used to dish up regularly. The fact that other studios (like Disney) are not capitalizing on this seems odd to me.

There's no question that Pixar has leveled off, though certainly at a high level. It seems all animated features have also leveled off in that while there are good films and bad, there are no real surprises and no new directions. Nothing stays the same forever and things could possibly get worse, but I do wish that somebody would go deeper into character. There's uncharted territory there for animation; theatre and live action have proven how rich that area is.

Wall-E

(There are spoilers galore here, so be warned.)

The last thing I'm going to do is try to make a message movie!

-Andrew Stanton

Andrew Stanton may not be trying to send a message, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there. Unfortunately, it overwhelms the main character and the message itself is only half-baked. The half that's there describes the problem; the missing half has to do with responsibility and offering a solution.

The film presents the audience with a monopoly capitalist economy gone mad. Buy N Large seems to be the only remaining business on the planet and it is so blind to the effects of its way of doing business that it finds it easier to transport its customers and system into space than to change its ways. The people who consume in this society are sheep. So long as they are entertained and distracted, they give no thought to the waste building up around them.

There is apparently no moral price to pay for this. The business isn't condemned for polluting the Earth and the consumers are not condemned for their willingness to attach themelves to the corporate teat. If the film has a villain, it's a ship's computer system that isn't flexible enough to deal with altered circumstances. Once the ship returns to Earth, there is no awareness of what got the humans into trouble in the first place or any plan for avoiding the problem in the future. No one takes responsibility, and that seems okay with Andrew Stanton. The humans get home, Wall-E gets a girl friend and that's all that seems to matter.

This isn't the first time that an animated feature has flirted with a message and then backed away from it. Chicken Run and Madagascar both deal with meat-eating as a threat but can't indict the meat-eating audience. Wall-E can't indict mindless consumption when Disney and Pixar are asking the audience to buy the DVD and whatever merchandise that this (and previous) movies have deposited on store shelves. When the point of a film is to generate profit, you can't expect the film to criticize the process by which the profit is made. That puts the film in an impossible situation.

And the strange thing is that it didn't have to be there. The film is called Wall-E, but the film seems to lose interest in him once the humans show up. The humans' situation overwhelms his love story, and the humans are not well-developed characters. The film abandons character for plot. Wall-E isn't even aware of what the plant means for the humans; he just wants to make sure Eve gets it, hoping that the gift will bring them closer emotionally. She also doesn't understand why it's important, simply that it's her prime directive.

That means there's a giant disconnect between the robots' and human's motivations. Had Wall-E understood the larger repercussions of the plant, at least the two stories would have been tied together. Instead they're separate and neither is particularly satisfying. Wall-E is treated as a child-like character, so his feelings for Eve can't go beyond the limits of puppy love. The humans have fouled their own nest and lack any initiative, so why should the audience care about them?

Science fiction requires that any novel ideas make sense, but there are big logic flaws in this film. If the Axiom's computers know that they've been directed not to return to Earth, why are they bothering to send the space probes there? What possible reason would the computers have for not notifying the humans that the Earth can't be rehabilitated? The humans seem totally satisfied on the ship, so what difference would it make?

Why, when the Axiom tilts, do people slide to the side? Either the ship has artificial gravity, in which case the people will be pulled towards the floors regardless of the ship's orientation (there is no 'up' in space), or the ship has no gravity, in which case the room would shift but the people would stay stationary.

It appears when two of the humans touch, it's a novel experience for them. So where do the babies on board come from?

If the ship disposal unit hurls tons of garbage into space, where does the ship get the raw material to keep manufacturing the crap that it sells to humans? Where are they getting all that rocket fuel for repeated probe trips, since there are several Eves on the probe mother ship and I assume that they've been sending probes for several hundred years?

A film that wants to be taken seriously has to do more than choose a serious subject. Wall-E flirts with big issues, but doesn't do them justice. The film is getting good reviews and will undoubtedly make money, but I found it to be a major disappointment.

Andrew Stanton

The director of Finding Nemo and the upcoming Wall-E is profiled in the New York Times Magazine.