John Carter came out on DVD and Blu-ray on June 5, and while there’s no word yet how it’s doing, there are many out there who liked the movie and want to see it get a second chance.
That’s the great thing about home video, a movie can indeed get a second life, make its money back, and live on for a long time.
As reported on Indie Wire, John Carter co-star Willem Dafoe is baffled by the film’s lackluster performance, and said, “You don’t like to publicly lament disappointments too much, but I’m still kind of scratching my head over it. For me, I thought John Carter really captured something. It was very pure in its approach. It was classical. It wasn’t hip and cool. It was really from the source, and I appreciate that.
“In my experience, sometimes a movie just hits at the worng time,” the actor continued. “Gets the wrong press, or gets the wrong representation, and it gets misunderstood.”
So now that the initial bad press and rival studio schadenfreude has died down a bit, what do the fans think of it? We know from the fan comments on TG that our readers definitely dig it, what about the rest of cyberspace?
Newsok.com writes that John Carter still has “quite a bit to recommend it, especially to fans of the book. The film is epic, visually appealing, and enjoyable, despite the rough box-office reception” in spite of Taylor Kitsch being “a little too bland,” and the film having “uneven pacing in places.”
Bigpicturebigsound.com gave it three stars out of four and called the film, “a sprawling fantasy epic that plays well in the 2D/3D home theater, John Carter won’t be the most original movie you’ll watch this year, but it will make for an enjoyable evening’s diversion.”
CraveOnline wrote, “I’m not sure why audiences decided to sh*t on John Carter. The list of great films that bombed when they first came out is longer than my arm. I reviewed the film back in March, and I freaking loved it.”
And as TG Daily’s CB Droege notes, “The film only loses a small part of its gloss when taken down from the silver screen to your television, but all of the performances and amazing, artful effects are still there, and of course, the transition does nothing to blunt the great world-building based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars novels.”
Yes, a lot of these reviews also point out John Carter’s flaws, it’s certainly not a perfect sci-fi epic, but judging from what we’ve read on the ‘Net, it clearly deserves another chance.
