Sab Than, Jeddak of Zodanga, armed with a special weapon obtained from the Thern leader Matai Shang, proposes a cease-fire and an end to the war by marrying the Princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris.

The film is largely based on A Princess of Mars (1912), the first in a series of 11 Burroughs novels to feature the interplanetary hero John Carter (and in later volumes the adventures of his children with Dejah Thoris).

Burroughs responded enthusiastically, recognizing that a regular live-action feature would face various limitations to adapt accurately, so he advised Clampett to write an original animated adventure for John Carter.

[20] The test footage, produced by 1936,[21] received negative reactions from film exhibitors across the U.S., especially in small towns; many gave their opinion that the concept of an Earthman on Mars was just too outlandish an idea for midwestern American audiences to accept.

[22] During the late 1950s, stop-motion animation effects director Ray Harryhausen expressed interest in filming the novels, but it was not until the 1980s that producers Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna bought the rights for the Walt Disney Studios via Cinergi Pictures, with a view to creating a competitor to the original Star Wars trilogy and Conan the Barbarian.

[34] Stanton prepared for directing by losing 20 pounds (9.1 kg), running 15 miles (24 km) a week, and vowed not to go to his trailer or even sit down except when absolutely necessary to avoid looking like "the privileged animation geek who'd cheated his way to the top".

Aware that Carter's backstory as an officer in the Confederate Army might be a problem for modern audiences, Stanton envisioned the character as disillusioned and disgusted with war in general, apart from the side he fought on.

[35] Lynn Collins, a Juilliard graduate set in her first major movie role as Dejah Thoris early on, tested with many actors, including Josh Duhamel, using a scene (filmed but cut) where she slaps Carter in the face.

That unpredictability, and the effect on the film's texture and grain, gave Mindel images he hoped would "[feel] inherently realistic in spite of the fantastical creatures and the extensive digital-visual-effects technology behind them".

The effects team doing proof-of-process tests realized when that movie came out that John Carter would require extensive use of all the techniques that Avatar had pioneered, and would go where that film had not with many more interactions between human actors and CGI characters.

[47] His ideas were used instead, and he ignored criticism that using a cover version of Led Zeppelin's 1975 song "Kashmir" in the trailer released in conjunction with an ad aired during that year's Super Bowl would make it seem less current to the contemporary younger audiences the film sought.

Chabon recalls reading a Quora post by one of its screenwriters, Sean Hood, about how he dealt with the movie's failure, and for the first time worrying about the possibility that John Carter could suffer the same fate.

According to the preview cards, that work would also include improving the pacing of the film's second act, making the motivations of the Therns clearer, and developing the relationship between Carter and Thoris so that their wedding at the end was not so much of a surprise.

[56] Disney moved the film's release up to early March 2012 from June,[12] giving it two box office weekends before Lionsgate's The Hunger Games, widely expected to do very well and compete for the same audience, came out.

[35] Tracking data, the results of long-term surveys of likely filmgoers to judge their interest in seeing an upcoming film upon its release, with a prediction of its opening weekend box office, for John Carter was returned to Disney in mid-February and shared both within and without the company.

In a news release announcing the premiere, Disney highlighted that the movie would be shown in 3D on a 70-foot (21 m) screen to an audience of 800 in three theaters, ranging from the cast and crew and company executives to critics, D23 members and winners of contests.

One was that more recent franchises, such as Star Wars, that had derived and borrowed from Burroughs' original concepts in the century since it had been written had exhausted the potential for audiences to be enthralled by any modern adaptation of his work.

[56] Another industry marketing person, speaking anonymously, told the Times that modern audiences have a "cognitive dissonance" problem with films set on Mars based on older works.

In July, Cranston called its cool reception "unwarranted" and blamed it on TV stations around the country focusing on commercial news about how John Carter had underperformed and not even won its opening weekend rather than offering a review of the film, leading viewers to make their decisions about what movie to see on that basis.

[64] In 2020 Screen Rant's Kayleigh Donaldson reiterated the earlier arguments that Stanton's Pixar-based filmmaking process had unnecessarily increased costs, and that the film's ensuing bloated production budget made it harder to be profitable, as had been the case with Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

Just ask the most recent Tarzan reboot for evidence of that, or Disney's own attempt to make The Lone Ranger a 21st century action favorite", referring to the studio's 2013 effort, which also failed at the box office.

Giacchino agreed but suggested a different merger, doing the Mars theme chorally near the end of the film, to accentuate the Therns' apparently inevitable takeover of the planet, an idea Stanton eagerly accepted.

Even if we completely suspend our disbelief and accept the entire story at face value, isn't it underwhelming to spend so much time looking at hand-to-hand combat when there are so many neat toys and gadgets to play with?

[109] Christy Lemire of The Boston Globe wrote that, "Except for a strong cast, a few striking visuals and some unexpected flashes of humor, John Carter is just a dreary, convoluted trudge – a soulless sprawl of computer-generated blippery converted to 3-D".

[121] Instead, Stanton was given the production budget requested for John Carter, backed with an estimated $100 million marketing campaign that is typical for a tentpole movie but without significant merchandising or other ancillary tie-ins.

[122] In September 2014, studio president Alan Bergman was asked at a conference if Disney had been able to partially recoup its losses on The Lone Ranger and John Carter through subsequent release windows or other monetization methods, and he responded: "I'm going to answer that question honestly and tell you no, it didn't get that much better.

The design and the cinematography are genuinely stunning and Stanton takes big swings, like a scene of Carter massacring a race of evil Tharnks that is intercut with him burying his wife and child back on Earth.

Stanton left it all on the field.Three months later, /Film's Sandy Schaefer, after admitting that the film was "not without its faults", found John Carter was visually accomplished, "combin[ing] the gravelly textures of a Western with the striking aesthetic of a pulp sci-fi epic".

Ironically, Schaefer concluded, "[a]fter a decade of superhero movies and Star Wars films, John Carter—itself adapted from source material that directly inspired so many of those things—comes across as more refreshing and less derivative now than when it was first released".

[140] Conversely, the passage of time had not helped the film for Gizmodo's Germain Lussier, who wrote, "I remember not hating the movie, but not particularly liking it either, and in the decade since release I've always wondered if John Carter had cult potential".