John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

by Sellers, Michael D.

  Apart from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, fall and winter 2010-2011 would bring a number of films that looked relatively weak, and in need of some concerted attention. Following that, the summer of 2011 would bring Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but it was already established that former Sony Marketing Co-President Valerie Van Gelder was running that show, at Jerry Bruckheimer’s insistence.

  Farther out, Marvel’s The Avengers was already being touted as a “can’t miss” winner slated for release in May 2012, and the Marvel team had already, by the time the acquisition took place, put in place a long and varied list of corporate partners, creative cross promotions, and merchandising tie-ins.

  John Carter of Mars, slated for June 8, 2012 release, was next, followed by Pixar’s Brave.

  MT Carney’s Baptism by Fire

  One of Carney’s first acts was to re-organize the department into pods of focus rather than have everyone work on each movie. She ordered a study of Disney’s ad-buying process; she got rid of more than a dozen staff members; and she implemented a chic redesign of the offices in Burbank where the marketing division operated. She also undertook a round of firings in which some of the senior staff were replaced with new, younger staff who in Carney’s view were more digitally savvy than the oldsters she was letting go, and thus were more in line with Rich Ross’s vision for the direction the marketing division should take.

  But if Ross and Carney had an idea of transforming the department, the iconic producers relying on Disney marketing were not so sure and thus the early months of Carney’s tenure were also marked by the hiring of marketing veterans who were assigned specifically to Disney’s major “client producers” to handle their product. Valerie Van Galder was brought in to handle the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides for Jerry Bruckheimer; Kevin Campbell was brought in at the behest of Dreamworks CEO Stacey Snider to handle Dreamworks films; and Dana Precious was hired to handle Marvel. A senior media strategist, Michael Kassan, was also brought in to review all aspects of Disney’s marketing strategy -- with the net result leaving Carney in a role that was bearing increasing signs of a coordinator -- with an exception to this being John Carter.

  As the films began to roll out, Carney was forced to learn quickly about what Sharon Waxman, writing in the respected “The Wrap” would call “the shark-infested waters of major studio movie releases.”117 The first major film in the pipeline, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, opened on July 14 to an anemic $17M domestically en route to a $63M domestic and $215M worldwide total. Her second major release, Secretariat, opened on October 7 to just $12.6M and was soundly beaten by The Social Network in its second week.

  While the “client producers” would all get their own marketing consultant -- in what would turn out to be a fateful decision, John Carter of Mars -- lacking a Bruckheimer, Spielberg, or Feige to please -- was not assigned an outside consultant. The in-house Disney team would handle the picture, headed by Carney herself.

  While there was considerable interest in Hollywood in the Carney experiment, Carney herself gave few interviews and was rarely quoted. One exception: in the aftermath of the Secretariat opening in October, veteran Hollywood journalist Sharon Waxman got Carney to sit down for an interview and asked her tough questions about her early months in Hollywood. Carney’s answers are revealing on multiple levels:118

  On the hiring of consultants: “I’m very respectful of the movie business and of people’s experience. I feel the combination of my experience and their movie experience will be great. I have hired and I will continue to hire the absolute best people that I can find. I’m aware of the fact that I don’t have tons of experience, so I hire around me the people that have experience that are really good. You’ll see the people I’m going to hire over the next couple of months, it just keeps getting better. Do I think I can cut a better 30 second spot than Val Van Galder than Dana Precious? Of course I can’t. That’s why I hired them. I have other skills. And the combination of that together will be something really cool--if you people just give me a chance.”

  On the Secretariat marketing strategy: “This one I look and can’t think what we did wrong. We had huge buzz. We got more Internet buzz than a whole lot of movies. In the heartland people are older, they don’t run out to see a movie on its first weekend, and "Social Network" held on better than we thought. It took away a big chunk of our audience. I don’t think we made any big mistakes in marketing campaign. I’m very proud of the campaign, and it’s a shame it wasn’t a massive rip-roaring success. Randall and Gordon McVeigh and Sean and Rich – everybody was completely on board. All the team. This was movie that Rich and Sean didn’t greenlight, everyone really wanted it to do well. We did our best, put together great campaign.”

  On whether her experience in New York meant she could bring insight to Hollywood: “There are some simple fixes in the way things are put together in terms of process and structure which can make things much more effective. We just came from doing a four-day conference with marketing and distribution executives in Europe. We talked about planning further in advance, and taking into consideration the needs of individual markets further in advance so we’re not doing just-in-time planning. The way it was done different [by Disney]. So people have marketing plans early, that is changing the way we work with non-domestic markets so we can start to become much more global. Movies are so global now. And we’re trying to make sure that everything we do strategically we do for a reason, and not just because it’s cool. There can’t be any dead ends in what we do. Everything should link to something else. And everything should link to a sale. Getting everyone to work together in collaborative. It sounds kumbaya, but it’s just very practical.”

  Carney, new to the industry and with a very full plate of other issues demanding her focus, would be directly in charge of the JCOM campaign. Her “strategic vision” as revealed in the interview with Waxman speaks for itself.

  Changing the John Carter Release Date

  As it happened, it was not until January 2011 that something occurred that would bring JCOM fully onto Carney’s radar. Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, scheduled for release on March 9, 2012, needed to be moved to a later release date. That left open the March 9 date -- the same weekend that had worked extremely well for Alice in Wonderland in 2010. It was already clear that the 2011 offering for that weekend, Mars Needs Moms, was in trouble and would not perform well -- but it was not a weekend, or month, that could be lightly cast aside; a film needed to be identified and placed in the March 9, 2012 slot.

  Could JCOM be ready for a March 9, 2012 release?

  The decision had to be made shortly after Sean Bailey and Brigham Taylor had viewed the 170 minute cut of the film that Stanton had shown to the “Brain Trust” at Pixar in December 2010. Normally, if Bailey as head of production felt that JCOM was in trouble, the idea of advancing the release by three months would make no sense, particularly with “tentpole dollars” at stake. But Bailey gave a thumbs up to JCOM being moved forward, with Morris, Collins, and Stanton all agreeing to the move.

  Apart from the fact that March is not blockbuster “primetime” in the way that June is, the other problem with March 9, 2012, was that Ridley’s Scott’s Sci-Fi epic Prometheus was slated for that date. Did Disney really want to put JCOM up head to head against Fox’s Prometheus? Or, if JCOM vacated June 8, could Fox be induced to move Prometheus from March to June, in effect swapping dates with the Disney film?

  Ross, Carney, Bailey and President of Distribution Chuck Viane, a 25 year Disney veteran and a close ally of the departed Dick Cook, analyzed the situation. June 2012 was looking very crowded now. Snow White and Huntsman and GI Joe: Retaliation were slated for June, followed by a jam-packed July starting with The Amazing Spiderman. Could a case be made to justify moving JCOM to March to fill the slot vacated by Frankenweenie?

  No one felt that Stanton’s film would prosper from the swap if it meant going up head to head with Prometheus, particularly in a lean m
onth like March. And that was the dilemma: As crowded as it was in June, the large June “pie” was typically $1.1 - $1.5B, while the March “pie” was typically $650-900M. There were exceptions of course, such as 2010 when Alice in Wonderland had a surprisingly strong run and drove the March total to $1B. But the norm was closer to $750M, which meant that JCOM would need a much larger relative share of the market if it moved to March. Prometheus was a problem, and The Hunger Games on March 23 was also a problem.

  But, assuming Prometheus would move to June, could it work?

  Seen from the perspective of JCOM only, June was a better. The crowded nature of the market was offset by the larger size of the market. But while JCOM would benefit from sticking to the June release, the studio still had a problem -- it had a hole to fill in March because Frankenweenie simply wasn’t on track to be ready.

  A tentative decision was reached: The studio’s needs would trump the more narrow needs of one film. As long as the Stanton didn’t scream too loudly, John Carter of Mars would take the vacated Frankenweenie spot and move to March 9, 2012.

  To sell the validity of the idea to skeptics, the studio would invoke the fact that this was the exact same weekend that Alice in Wonderland had done so well with in 2010, proving that a March release could do $1B or more.

  But it was also the exact same weekend that the upcoming flop-in-the-making Mars Needs Moms would be released in 2011.

  The January 19, 2011, announcement of the release date change would be the first official announcement recorded by IMDB from Disney about JCOM since August 15, 2010, a period of five month of media silence. An interesting component of that earlier announcement on August 15th was that the announcement made no mention of the film’s budget (which had previously been announced as $150M, at the time Taylor Kitsch had been cast), and the press coverage of the announcement was uniformly positive. Empire Online, for example, in announcing the June 8 date had referred to John Carter of Mars as “all kinds of exciting,”119 Brian Gallagher of Movieweb called it “highly anticipated,”120 Joey Paur at Geek Tyrant talked of it as a film “I’m very much looking forward to seeing,” 121 and in all -- of more than 40 publications that covered the announcement, none offered any negative commentary. Also interesting is the fact that the reader comments reacting to the announcement contained less than 10% negative -- and that negativity was generally directed at the announcement’s acknowledgment that the film, which had been shot with traditional 2D cameras, would be presented in post-modified Disney 3D.

  A key feature of the John Carter of Mars promotional profile as of the time that the announcement was made was that, until that time, while there had not been a great deal of publicity generated about the film, what publicity had been generated had been positive. There had been zero negative press coverage of the film -- it had a “clean sheet” as of January 19, 2011. Thus the “influencer” media was on board with John Carter, and the negativity that would later surface had not yet manifested itself.

  Carney, whose expertise in modern digital media had been a key factor in hiring her over others who were more qualified in the traditional aspects of movie marketing, made sure that the journalists to whom the news of the change in release date were given the story as Disney wanted it to be played -- that the move was a bold one, pitting JCOM against Ridley Scott’s presumed blockbuster Prometheus.

  The “spin” worked as planned, up to a point. Typical of the coverage was Deadline New York, which in reporting the move, wrote: “there were definitely some raised eyebrows at Fox today at this aggressive John Carter Of Mars vs Prometheus scheduling move by Disney. Dogfight! Prometheus is that Ridley Scott film scripted with Lost’s Damon Lindelof from Alien DNA. So now Disney’s 3D John Carter Of Mars based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fantasy series comes off its June 8th, 2012, date and onto March 9, 2012.”122

  But while Disney was generally successful in controlling the journalists through whom the story was released, it was less successful in controlling the comment threads in which readers -- who in marketing terms were key consumer “influencers” as well, since the comments become part of the article -- would react to the announcement. And it was here, in the comment threads, that the first bits of negativity toward JCOM began to surface. One typical comment, in response to the Deadline New York announcement: “I certainly hope the move of John Carter of Mars from summer to pre-May is not indicative of the quality of the film being less-than expected.”

  Although these comments were significant because they marked the first negativity, in general terms the announcement was managed effectively enough that the comment never got out of hand; the ratio of positive/negative comments stayed at 90%/10% or better, and the universe that tracked movie release dates in advance generally accepted Disney’s arguments why the move was a good, aggressive one.

  A week after Disney announced that JCOM was moving to March 9, Fox announced that Prometheus was moving its release date to June 8, 2012, in essence swapping with John Carter. This created the impression, desired by Carney on behalf of JCOM and Disney, that Disney’s aggressive move had caused Prometheus to blink, and move, leaving the March 9 date to JCOM.

  Generally, from a media relations standpoint, the announcement -- while generating the first bits of negativity in comment threads -- had gone about as well as could be expected and the switch had been made without doing substantial damage to JCOM or Disney.

  Yet with the acceleration of the release date came a renewed urgency to ramp up the promotion and publicity. Disney had released nothing to the media about JCOM from August 15, 2010, until the January 19, 2011 announcement of the release date change.123 Carney had assured Ross that the campaign could handle the earlier release date; now it was time to begin making good on that assurance.

  But curiously, even after the accelerated release date was announced on January 19, 2011, the months of February, March, and April 2011 were as bereft of any coverage of JCOM as the previous six months had been.

  The one exception: On January 31, 2011, in a brief interview which was not arranged by Disney publicity and which took place on the red carpet during his arrival at the MTV Movie Awards, Stanton provided what would be the only public update on the status of the movie during what would be a nine month period from the original release date announcement on August 15, 2010, until May 2011. Stanton’s update, which was posted by MTV, was widely picked up across the entertainment spectrum, included:124

  I’m not in post-production — I’m in digital principal photography now, which goes on for the rest of 2011, so I’m only halfway through the movie........When you’ve made animated movies your whole life, it was pretty exciting to be outside for a day, let alone for months. For as cold and as hot and as hard as it was, which I knew it would be, I was up for it and it was a blast. It was the hardest thing I’ll ever have done, but man, it was a great adventure. It was like sailing across the ocean, you know, everything that goes with that.

  Hopefully he’ll [Taylor Kitsch] be another great face on the big screen, and hopefully he’ll be John Carter to people and nobody else if we’ve done it right. .......I didn’t try to make it [the film] look like anything else. I really tried to make it its own thing. I tried to make a very historically accurate Martian film if that makes sense, so I’ll let you decipher that.

  The interview prompted reactions on the various sites that published it. The following exchange, from the popular site Slashfilm.com, is significant for several reasons:125

  Daniel Horton: This is easily one of my most anticipated movies of 2012. It's interesting that there's been such a tight lid on this movie, there's not been a single image released of anyone in costume as far as I'm aware.

  Corey Atad: FINALLY. That man has been in radio silence for like a year and a half. Great to hear things are moving along. Can't wait for John Carter.

  Tobor 68: I was just thinking about this film and wondering where it's at! so good timing on the article! historically accurate Martians, well that sounds
like they've done their research on sci-fi imagery of the era. probably what kind of imagery ERB was saturated with. so, for me, being a fan of that era. this will be astounding and/or amazing!!

  JP Money: "historically accurate Martians, well that sounds like they've done their research on sci-fi imagery of the era."

  Palmer S. It amazes me how under wraps they've managed to keep this whole production; can't wait to see the finished product.

  FJ2036: Wow I forgot about this project, there hasn't been any buzz or articles on movie websites/magazines. Can't wait to see an official image!

  This exchange of comments questioning the ‘media silence’ over JCOM was repeated on multiple sites that carried the Andrew Stanton interview, and is significant. Movie marketing in 2012 relies on social media chatter, and comments are monitored for the volume; the subject matter; and the positive/negative ratio.

  At this point -- 13 months before release -- the film had been “buried” for months with no effort being made to “prime the pump” with early articles, set visits, images, and interviews.

  Why?

  The fact was -- it was the sudden acceleration of the JCOM release schedule that finally brought the film to MT Carney’s full attention. Previously the release was still 16 months out; now, suddenly, at was barely a year out and it was time to focus on it.

  With that focus, a problem surfaced.

  The Branding Problem

  Like virtually all of the films in the pipeline, John Carter of Mars had been green-lit by the previous regime of Dick Cook, so that alone did not differentiate it. But the fact that it’s budget was a whopping $250M, and it was being produced by a Pixar team headed by Andrew Stanton but also including Pixar’s general manager Jim Morris and Pixar producer Lindsey Collins, made it different. The word had come down from Iger through Ross to Carney that it was to be marketed in a regular as opposed to the exceptional marketing normally associated with extremely expensive tentpole franchise movies, without the kind of creative marketing and cross-promotional tie-ins that Marvel , for example, had dazzlingly arranged for The Avengers. Faced with the new release date of March 9, 2012, Carney conducted a strategic review of the project.