Fans and Media Looking Forward to John Carter of Mars Movies
There’s nothing quite like the cash cows that Hollywood science fiction and fantasy movies turn out to be when thousands of Web sites ramp up their “fannish” content in anticipation. Disney’s “John Carter of Mars” movie won’t be released until 2012 and yet throughout 2009 every fanboy site, cool media site, and science fiction archive has managed to stake a claim in what is now a highly competitive name space.
The search results for “John Carter of Mars” reveal of mixture of database-driven made-for-advertising sites and semi-journalistic blogs from the gaming and entertainment industries. Buried deep in the search results are real fannish John Carter of Mars sites that lack the power to compete with the big commercial sites. If you look hard enough, you may find a John Carter of Mars discussion in a Web forum somewhere.
Only a few years ago pre-movie enthusiast articles were 99% written by the fan community and largely ignored by big media sites. But the need for eyeballs to power advertising-driven revenues has led to a feeding frenzy of rehashed rumors about every celebrity, proposed movie project, and anecdote writers can wrap their plastic, cliche-laden fingers around. And if that doesn’t provide enough fodder for the fan-kiddies, a retrospective or “Top Ten” list of books, movies, and moments will usually fill the gap.
The hype and hysteria around the Disney/Pixar flick is especially heated despite a “B-list” cast. Taylor Kitsch plays John Carter and Lynn Collins plays his love, Dejah Thoris. James Purefoy, Willem Dafoe, and a few other solid, established actors round out the cast but there are no Bruce Willises or Natalie Portmans in the lineup. Andrew Stanton and Michael Chabon are writing the screenplay. Stanton will direct the live-action movie.
Hoping to cash in on the fannish search frenzy, independent film studio The Asylum has rushed a direct-to-DvD production called “A Princess of Mars” toward a December 2009 release. Starring Traci Lords as Dejah Thoris. The movie updates the storyline by making Carter a 21st century warrior rather than the Civil War veteran in the original books.
