John Carter’s Posters Accidentally Illustrate Why The Movie Failed And How The Reboot Can Fix It
Disney’s 2012 John Carter movie was based on one of the most classic and influential science fiction series of all time. While it didn’t perform as well as many hoped, there was potential in the production, if they’d made a few more left turns.
Now that there’s a John Carter reboot on the way, it seems like it’s a good time to revisit what went wrong with the original movie in an attempt to prompt someone to avoid repeating those mistakes.
There were a lot of mistakes. Even the movie’s title is a mistake. John Carter is the most generic title possible. It’s especially a foolish choice, given that the first book in the original John Carter series is titled A Princess of Mars. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t have looked a lot better on a movie poster.
In fact, John Carter’s movie posters do a pretty good job of illustrating what went wrong with the movie in general. Not just the title but the ideals behind the production. Here’s every John Carter movie poster released…
The posters work, but they also highlight the biggest problem the movie has. They all scream family-friendly. The books Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote are not at all PG.
John Carter is, after all, a violent barbarian warrior-style book about a world in which women don’t wear clothes. That’s why no poster they do for John Carter will ever match the books’ covers, which looked like this…
At least on the book cover, they put Deja Thoris in pasties. She does not wear those in the text of the book. Martian women are strong, confident, and have no body shame. They don’t need clothes. Or at least that’s the premise Burroughs presents as the reality of life on Mars.
Someone besides Disney should have snatched up this franchise and made it the rated-R movie it’s supposed to be because this is an R-rated, Conan-style story set in space. Not James Cameron’s Avatar.
Avatar, which “borrows” a lot of its plot from these books, solved some of this issue by making its scantily clothed warrior characters into blue CGI aliens. Somehow, that’s more culturally acceptable, though, from my vantage point, it’s not exactly clear why.
John Carter had a few green CGI warriors they didn’t bother to throw many clothes on, but too many of the “alien” characters in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books are extremely human-looking. So there wasn’t a good excuse to turn them into blue cat people.
Modern cultural norms are no longer accepting of the idea that strong women don’t need clothes, but the John Carter books were written back in the early 1900s. Back then, his ideas were seen as radically progressive and liberal. Edgar Rice Burroughs was pushing back against the conservatism of his era, in his own way.
Given the context of our current culture, it’s hard to imagine anyone even trying to make more John Carter. Those ideals don’t really fit in with modern cultural rules. In fact, those are the kinds of ideas people get canceled for.
This probably means that the new reboot (which is also a Disney production) will continue Hollywood’s tradition of ruining the book because Edgar Rice Burroughs’ work is basically unfilmable in today’s modern world. Hopefully, though, some way will be found to keep the spirit of the original Princess of Mars novels without creating content that’ll get everyone who made it on a blacklist. If they have any sense, they’ll start by giving it the right title and work backward from there.
