CNN just reported on Disney’s bad egg, John Carter, which cost $300 million to make and has only returned a third of that to the studio, costing Disney $200 million. Andrew Stanton, the very talented director of not only John Carter but also Finding Nemo and Wall-E, has got to be feeling pretty low right now.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve been following the reviews and the ads with some interest — or rather, bemused disinterest. I feel like I should be interested; I’m a 20-somethings male who has in the past year paid to see more than one Marvel movie or space adventure. I like throwbacks, mashups, and classic literature, so why wouldn’t I be into a sci-fi movie based on a book by the author of Tarzan?
Bad branding, that’s why.
It’s always thorny to place blame for why a movie fails, but I can say with some certainty that Carter‘s problems started (publicly) when they released the first ad with the name “John Carter” as the only title. The assumption there (as reported by this tough but fair Vulture article) was that John Carter was a name as fixed in the public’s imagination as Tarzan himself.
Had you ever heard of John Carter? I hadn’t.
Without any meaning behind the name, we — the potentially-interested audience — were left to try and build an identity for John Carter as someone we cared about in the span of a 30-to-180 second trailer. But John Carter just kind of looked like a scruffy dude running around in what seemed to be an uglier version of Avatar, with a random girl (is she an alien? A human? She looks human, but she’s hanging out with those four-arm guys a lot, sooO..?).
The original book this movie is based on was called A Princess of Mars. This is the second time in the past year (I’m looking at you, Rapunzel) that a Disney movie’s name was changed from stronger to weaker because of a fear of alienating boys. “A Princess of Mars” tells the viewer where we are, who that girl is, and gives us an idea what that scruffy guy is fighting for. Oh, a girl. Okay, I get that. NOW I can take in the super-jumping and the giant-four-arm ape battle.
As any brand manager will tell you, a “brand” is a lot bigger than colors or logos — it’s the whole totality of your product or company as it exists in the mind of your market/audience. The problem with “John Carter” as a title was that it had no existence in the mind of its audience, and therefore quickly became laughable or, worse yet, — as the laughably-titled-but-not-as-much-of-a-failure Cowboys and Aliens can attest — forgettable.
You don’t want anyone forgetting your $300 million dollar movie sixty seconds after they see the trailer.
If Disney had been gutsy enough to title the film “A Princess of Mars,” and then showed boys the action scenes, they would have a branded movie. Instead they just had, “Oh, that space movie? What’s it called? John Carter … That sounds like a legal drama or something.”
[Edit: Ironically, I just remembered that a running gag in the movie is that the aliens can’t remember John Carter’s name, thinking he’s called “Virginia.†So even within the movie, “John Carter†is forgettable branding. How meta is that?]
One response to “Bad branding cost Disney $200m on “John Carter””
The only thing I can agree with about Disney’s marketing decisions was to *not* call it “A Princess of Mars.” Not because of any gender-related issues, but because the first movie in what was certainly intended as a series should establish the main character’s name or, in this case, brand. I do agree that simply “John Carter” was a big mistake.
Just about every other take on the character (mostly in comics) was entitled some variation of “John Carter of Mars” with the longest running being Marvel’s “John Carter, Warlord of Mars” comic.
In any case, I feel like A Princess of Mars, while a nice, evocative title for a pulp story, is a terribly weak one for an action movie.