Well, that could have gone better: “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax” wiped the megaplex floor with “John Carter”, grossing $39.1 million in its second weekend and leaving Andrew Stanton’s challenger in the (red) dust with a paltry $30.6 million. Given that “John Carter” cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter-billion dollars, its failure to find an audience pretty much spikes any chance of a franchise.
Not that “John Carter” is the greatest science-fiction adventure since “Avatar”, but certainly it isn’t as bad as some of the reviews would have you believe. (I came down on the “more entertaining than not” side of things, myself.) And it did really well overseas, grossing some $70 million in foreign markets … but that didn’t help “The Golden Compass” spawn a sequel at New Line, and I can’t imagine a company as risk-averse as Disney even considering a return trip to the red planet now.
I’d say that the movie is DOA, however there was the incredibly rare case of Titanic, which premiered with an unimpressive opening weekend (barely edging out Tomorrow Never Dies) yet had ridiculous staying power from week to week. Given the general lack of enthusiasm for John Carter, that’s probably a pipe dream here.
Yeah, I don’t really see the two as equivalent. Although it would be nice to see it stay in the top three for a while …