You thought when John Carter came out and bombed that the other shoe had finally dropped on a movie everyone predicted would fail.
Well apparently the shoes keep on dropping, because Rich Ross, Disney chairman, just got the boot over at the mouse house, in no small thanks to John Carter.
You can definitely feel bad for John Carter, because Pixar’s Andrew Stanton has never had a flop, and when failure finally came, it was big and embarrassing, not to mention it was failure on the level of the biggest flops in Hollywood history.
Usually when a movie bombs that big, heads will roll, and Ross had to go.
As Deadline reports, “Make no mistake about it: Ross did not simply decide to step down: he was fired.” Ross became Chairman of Disney in 2009, and before this he was President of Disney Channels Worldwide. Before getting sh*t canned, Ross was at Disney for over 15 years total.
Again, John Carter had a rich legacy in sci-fi history, and it was hopeful that Pixar’s Andrew Stanton would knock one out of the park when he finally did something in the live action format, but quite a few people felt that Pixar went over to the dark side with Cars 2, where like Lucas the company became more about the toys than the quality of the films.
As often happens when a studio executive gets fired, Ross has a number of films in the pipeline that are forthcoming, and he unfortunately won’t be around to bask in the glory if they succeed.
Titles of note include Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, which is due October 5, Oz The Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi and coming March 8, 2013, and The Lone Ranger, which is due May 31, 2013.
