Filming
Principal photography commenced at Longcross Studios, London, in January 2010 and ended in Kanab, Utah in July 2010. Locations in Utah included Lake Powell and the counties of Grand, Wayne, and Kane.
A month-long reshoot took place in Playa Vista, Los Angeles. The film was shot in the Panavision anamorphic format on Kodak 35 mm film. Stanton denied assertions that he had gone over budget and stated that he had been allowed a longer reshoot because he had stayed on budget and on time.
However, he did admit to reshooting much of the movie twice, far more than is usually common in live action filmmaking. He attributed that to his animation background.
"The thing I had to explain to Disney was, 'You're asking a guy who's only known how to do it this way to suddenly do it with one reshoot.'" he explained later. "I said, 'I'm not gonna get it right the first time, I'll tell you that right now.'"
Stanton often sought advice from people he had worked with at Pixar on animated films (known as the Braintrust) instead of those with live-action experience working with him.
Stanton also was quoted as saying, "I said to my producers, ‘Is it just me, or do we actually know how to do this better than live-action crews do?’"
Rich Ross, Disney's chairman, successor to Dick Cook, who had originally approved the film for production, came from a television background and had no experience with feature films. The studio's new top marketing and production executives had little more.
Marketing
Disney's head of marketing during the production was MT Carney, an industry outsider who previously ran a marketing boutique in New York. Stanton often rejected marketing ideas from the studio, according to those who worked on the film.
Stanton's ideas were used instead, and he ignored criticism that using Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir", a song recorded in 1974, in the trailer would make it seem less current to the contemporary younger audiences the film sought.
He also chose billboard imagery that failed to resonate with prospective audiences, and put together a preview reel that did not get a strong reception from a convention audience.
Stanton said, “My joy when I saw the first trailer for Star Wars is I saw a little bit of almost everything in the movie, and I had no idea how it connected, and I had to go see the movie.
So the last thing I’m going to do is ruin that little kid’s experience.” Following the death of Steve Jobs, Stanton dedicated the film in his memory.
Although being based on the first book of the series, A Princess of Mars, the film was originally titled John Carter of Mars, but Stanton removed "of Mars" to make it more appealing to a broader audience, stating that the film is an "origin story.
It's about a guy becoming John Carter of Mars." Stanton plans to keep "Mars" in the title for future films in the series. Kitsch said the title was changed to reflect the character's journey, as John Carter will become "of Mars" only in the last few minutes of the picture.
Former Disney marketing president MT Carney also has taken blame for suggesting the title change.
Another reported explanation for the name change was that Disney had suffered a significant loss in March 2011 with Mars Needs Moms, the studio reportedly conducted a study which noted recent movies with the word "Mars" in the title had not been commercially successful.
Earlier, two and a half years before the premiere of the film, on December 29, 2009, a low-budget film produced by the independent film company The Asylum, entitled Princess of Mars, was released direct-to-DVD in the United States. Stanton referred to the competing film as a "crappy knock-off".
Critical Response
One week before the film's release, Disney removed an embargo on reviews of the film. John Carter received mixed reviews from critics.
As of November 19, 2012, it holds a 51% rating on the film-critics aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes based on 216 reviews; its consensus is, "While John Carter looks terrific and delivers its share of pulpy thrills, it also suffers from uneven pacing and occasionally incomprehensible plotting and characterization."
At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average out of 100 to critics' reviews, the film holds a score of 51 based on 42 reviews, signifying "Mixed or average reviews".
Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Derivative but charming and fun enough, Disney's mammoth scifier is both spectacular and a bit cheesy."
Glenn Kenny of MSN Movies rated the film 4 out of 5 stars, saying, "By the end of the adventure, even the initially befuddling double-frame story pays off, in spades. For me, this is the first movie of its kind in a very long time that I'd willingly sit through a second or even third time."
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film 2.5 out of 4 stars, commenting that the movie "is intended to foster a franchise and will probably succeed. Does John Carter get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does."
Dan Jolin of Empire gave the film 3 stars out of 5, noting, "Stanton has built a fantastic world, but the action is unmemorable. Still, just about every sci-fi/fantasy/superhero adventure you ever loved is in here somewhere."
Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News gave the film 3 out of 5 stars, calling the film "undeniably silly, sprawling and easy to make fun of, [but] also playful, genuinely epic and absolutely comfortable being what it is. In this genre, those are virtues as rare as a cave of gold."
Conversely, Peter Debruge of Variety gave a negative review, saying, "To watch John Carter is to wonder where in this jumbled space opera one might find the intuitive sense of wonderment and awe Stanton brought to Finding Nemo and WALL-E."
Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a D rating, feeling, "Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better."
Christy Lemire of The Boston Globe wrote that, "Except for a strong cast, a few striking visuals and some unexpected flashes of humor, John Carter is just a dreary, convoluted trudge – a soulless sprawl of computer-generated blippery converted to 3-D."
Michael Philips of the Chicago Tribune rated the film 2 out of 4 stars, saying the film "isn't much – or rather, it's too much and not enough in weird, clumpy combinations – but it is a curious sort of blur."
Andrew O'Herir of Salon.com called it "a profoundly flawed film, and arguably a terrible one on various levels. But if you’re willing to suspend not just disbelief but also all considerations of logic and intelligence and narrative coherence, it’s also a rip-roaring, fun adventure, fatefully balanced between high camp and boyish seriousness at almost every second."
Mick LaSelle of San Francisco Chronicle rated the film 1 star out of 4, noting, "John Carter is a movie designed to be long, epic and in 3-D, but that's as far as the design goes. It's designed to be a product, and it's a flimsy one."
A.O. Scott of The New York Times said, "John Carter tries to evoke, to reanimate, a fondly recalled universe of B-movies, pulp novels and boys’ adventure magazines. But it pursues this modest goal according to blockbuster logic, which buries the easy, scrappy pleasures of the old stuff in expensive excess. A bad movie should not look this good."
In the UK, the film was savaged by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, gaining only 1 star out of 5 and described as a "giant, suffocating doughy feast of boredom".
The film garnered 2 out of 5 stars in The Daily Telegraph, described as "a technical marvel, but is also armrest-clawingly hammy and painfully dated".
BBC film critic Mark Kermode expressed his displeasure with the film commenting, "The story telling is incomprehensible, the characterisation is ludicrous, the story is two and a quarter hours long and it's a boring, boring, boring two and a quarter hours long."
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