John Carter is set to become one of Hollywood’s biggest flops after the Walt Disney Company said that it expected to write down $200 million on the film.
Directed by Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, the 3-D effects-laden movie about a Civil War-era soldier who finds himself transported to Mars, has earned about $184 million (£116 million) at the box office worldwide.
However, ticket sales are split approximately in half with cinema operators, and the film’s production budget is estimated to be about $250 million, with about $100 million more spent on marketing.
The film was based on a series of books written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, starting with A Princess of Mars in 1912 and ending with John Carter of Mars, published posthumously in 1964.
With plenty of material for sequels and prequels, it had been hoped that John Carter would kick off the next big Disney franchise. The box-office performance of the film would suggest that that is unlikely to happen.
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The film earned only average notices. In a review for The Times, Jonathan Ross wrote: “Despite the efforts of Stanton, Mark Andrews [screenplay] and the novelist Michael Chabon, who was brought in to punch up the dialogue, it is tethered to a rather dreary screenplay.”
The film critic Peter Bradshaw, of The Guardian, called it a “suffocating doughy feast of boredom”. He wrote: “John Carter is one of those films that is so stultifying, so oppressive and so mysteriously and interminably long that I felt as if someone had dragged me into the kitchen of my local Greggs and was baking my head into the centre of a colossal cube of white bread.”
The poor reception was a shock given Mr Stanton’s track record, which includes Oscars for the animated films Finding Nemo and Wall-E.
The flop ranks with history’s biggest box-office disasters, although it is difficult to rank them precisely because of inflation and incomplete disclosure.
Disney’s Mars Needs Moms from last year cost about $150 million to make but only sold $40 million in tickets worldwide, according to the Hollywood.com analyst Paul Dergarabedian.
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Warner Bros’ Speed Racer from 2008 cost about $120 million but took in only about $94 million in tickets.
Columbia Pictures’ Ishtar in 1987 cost about $40 million but earned only $14 million in the United States.
But even the most famed flop, Kevin Costner’s Waterworld, eventually broke even on the back of foreign markets and home video sales.
Disney said that the loss on John Carter would result in a loss of between $80 million and $120 million for the quarter, wiping out profits from other movies and DVD sales.
Most of Disney’s profits come from its pay TV channels, such as ESPN, so the studio loss is more an embarrassment than a financial drain.