John Carter will always stand as one of the biggest flops of Disney’s history, meaning it was doubtful the film was ever going to get a sequel. However, director Andrew Stanton already had a plan of what was to come next for the fantasy saga, and he recently laid out an extensive description of the opening that would have appeared in a second movie, which would have been titled Gods of Mars.
Stanton spoke to The Wrap to honor the tenth anniversary of the movie, and while it is one that many will remember for the wrong reasons, Stanton was still able to recall the epic opening he originally planned for the follow-up had things gone a different way. He explained:
“I love the idea of you were going to open with the prologue. It was going to be that every movie had a different character saying the prologue. The first one is Willem, as Tars. The second one’s prologue narration was going to be Dejah. And it was going to give anybody that hadn’t seen the first movie a little precursor of the history that got you to this movie,” Stanton said. “Shorthand, interesting imagery, whether it was artwork or whatever. And then you were going to reveal she was telling it to her baby. And you were going to realize, Oh my God, it’s the child. It’s Carthoris, this child of Dejah Thoris and Carter. And that story she’s telling, she’s telling the story of the father that this child will never know. And then her dad, Ciarán Hinds’ character, Tardos Mors, said she’s been up too long, she’s tired, let her grandfather have a moment with the child and I’ll put her to bed. Then it was going to be revealed to be Matai Shang in shapeshifting mode. And he was going to steal the baby. And then it was going to go onto the opening credits. The next image after the opening credits was going to be Carter lying in his funeral suit in the middle of the desert, just looking like a dead body in a wake and just waking up.”
John Carter was a $200 Million Write-Off for Disney Thanks To Poor Reviews and a Change in Priorities
The John Carter series was not only planned to have one, but two sequels, with Stanton previously revealing the third movie would have been called Warlord of Mars. A decade on from the movie’s release, this is the first time Stanton has gone into details of those plans. The film's release in 2012 came at a time when Disney was looking to build franchises, and John Carter was a sci-fi fantasy epic that could have rivaled any other big epic in the right circumstances. However, along with movies such as Prince of Persia, the film seemed to land in a time when epic fantasy was being pushed down the ranks behind a small emerging franchise called the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Disney had already put their money into Marvel Studios by the time The Avengers was released in 2012, and that became the focus of their franchise efforts, leaving big, expensive and, in terms of John Carter, massively costly movies were unable to come up for air. In all, the movie cost $350 million to make, over $130 million more than The Avengers, and while the Marvel team-up took over $1.5 billion at the box office, John Carter scraped in just $280 million. When all was said and done, John Carter lost Disney enough money to have almost entirely financed the first Avengers movie.
Like any film, John Carter has its fans and there will be those sad to have not seen Stanton’s sequels come to fruition. However, in the grand scheme of things, few would argue with the idea that if Disney had a straight choice between putting their faith in the Marvel or John Carter franchise, it is clear they backed the right horse.