That might have to do with the fact that few were likely familiar or interested in a movie about a character from an early 20th century series of sci-fi adventure novels. Questions of quality aside (the film’s Metacritic score is split almost down the middle at 51 percent), John Carter was simply rejected by audiences.
Disney tried this last year with John Carter and failed. As a result, studios will glom on to practically anything that is even vaguely recognizable (hello, Battleship!), preferably one with a title that is the name of a person or a cartoon or a superhero. has Batman, Superman, and the Lord of the Rings series Universal has the Bourne movies and the hit Fast and Furious series Sony has Spider-Man.īut in addition to all those very recognizable properties, there is pressure to expand and find more. Each studio has its own set of titles: Disney is basically a franchise machine these days - the studio is now in charge of the Star Wars, Marvel, Muppets, and Pixar brands Paramount has Star Trek and Mission: Impossible Fox has Ice Age, Planet of the Apes, and the X-Men films Warner Bros. Whether it’s ready-made properties like Star Wars or surprise hits that studios can then sequelize until the properties burn out (see the Hangover series), franchises are, and will continue to be, the name of the game. That’s because, as Obst writes in her book, studios need movies with “pre-awareness” - titles that are familiar enough to sell in both the U.S. Last November, shortly after it was announced that Disney had acquired Lucasfilm and would make a new Star Wars trilogy, Vulture’s Kyle Buchanan posited that we were entering a phase in which we would begin to see films from the same franchises over and over and over. These are not small problems, and there is no sign that they will be riding off into the sunset anytime soon. In addition to being massively expensive, The Lone Ranger demonstrates the industry’s franchise obsession, origin-story laziness, over-reliance on bloodless violence, and inability to prevent running-time bloat. It also happens to be a perfect example of almost everything that’s wrong with the current Hollywood blockbuster system.
Pirates of the Caribbean 4.5: Sparrow Goes West - is looking like it might be a huge tentpole movie (it reportedly cost $215-250 million) that goes down this weekend.
During their conversation, she grimly agreed with the two moguls, predicting, “If, say, four huge tentpole were to go down at the same time in the same season, it would be catastrophic.” Curious about whether or not this was simply exaggeration, Vulture’s David Edelstein got in contact with producer Lynda Obst, author of a new book titled Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business.
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg recently took part in a symposium in which they predicted an imminent “implosion” in the system as a result of the industry’s current obsession with blockbuster movies.
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