Disney's John Carter lost $200M on marketing that never said what the film was

John Carter had everything on paper: Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1912 A Princess of Mars — the novel that shaped Star Wars and Avatar — a director fresh off WALL-E and Finding Nemo, a Pulitzer-winning co-writer in Michael Chabon, and a $250 million budget with two sequels already planned. It opened on March 11, 2012 to $30 million, and CNN put Disney's hit at about $200 million.

The rot started with assumptions. Stanton 'could see no idea in which someone didn't know who John Carter of Mars was. But it's not Frankenstein; it's not Sherlock Holmes. Nobody cares,' one of the film's marketing executives told Vulture. Marketing chief MT Carney — new to cinema — cut 'of Mars' from the title because recent Mars movies had flopped; Chabon's reaction: 'From that meeting until it came out, it was not good after that.'

The teaser then left out every hook: no reference to Pixar (so the film would not look like a kids' movie), none to Burroughs or Chabon, no standout sequences, and no Woola, the Martian dog Vulture called the film's most distinctive visual element. 'This is one of the worst marketing campaigns in the history of movies,' a former Disney executive said. Stanton escaped with his career — Finding Dory grossed over $1 billion next — while the marketing executives involved soon left Disney.

About $200 million written down (CNN estimate); the $250M film took just $30 million on opening weekend, less than half the minimally acceptable bar.

Stanton treated the property like Batman, assuming decades of cultural familiarity that moviegoers simply did not have.

The title was stripped of 'of Mars' over unrelated Mars-movie flops, severing the film from its own genre.

Every selling point — Pixar pedigree, the source novel, the celebrity screenwriter, the Martian dog — was deliberately omitted from the teaser.

Marketing was run by an executive with no film-industry experience, and nobody wanted to rein in Pixar's golden-goose director.

Name recognition you assume is name recognition you never tested: a launch that hides its own hooks — Mars, Pixar, the source novel — leaves no way to make anyone care.

Ten years on, John Carter is remembered as a monumental failure but not a terrible movie; its Netflix run rekindled interest and a first video game went into production, though the planned sequels never came.