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BREAKING… Disney just released this statement about John Carter:
“In light of the theatrical performance of John Carter ($184 million global box office), we expect the film to generate an operating loss of approximately $200 million during our second fiscal quarter ending March 31. As a result, our current expectation is that the Studio segment will have an operating loss of between $80 and $120 million for the second quarter. As we look forward to the second half of the year, we are excited about the upcoming releases of The Avengers and Brave, which we believe have tremendous potential to drive value for the Studio and the rest of the company.”
Related:
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‘John Carter’ Tracking Shockingly Soft: “Could Be Biggest Writeoff Of All Time”
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Too bad Nikki couldn’t write this story… I was really looking forward to the “TOLDJA!” moment.
Can somebody tell me the purpose of releasing this statement?
Guessing it has something to do with letting shareholders know?
Usually when a publicly traded company knows they’re not going to make the expected numbers in a segment, they try to get the info out ASAP so they can avoid allegations of inside information when it comes to stock deals.
Disney is a public company, they are required to report about their finances to investors…
This is standard Wall Street “guidance” — management telling Wall Street what will be important to the earnings of the next quarter, before the official earnings announcement/10-Q filing.
Because they needed a write-off anyway instead of paying uncle sam.
And, don’t forget the 200 plus million dollar epic Lone Ranger next year.
If I were Disney, I would be looking for ways to hedge this, because the Depp factor is or has already run out of time to lure in audiences from his fading star power.
Oh well, Rich Ross and his brilliant marketing team will certainly save the day…oops…I mean their asses with their huge separation package deals.
Lone Ranger has a lot going for it, including a billion dollar combo in the actor and director. However, I do think the brown, dusty, desert setting may be a problem. It sounds kind of stupid, but world audiences seem to be turned off and shun movies with those settings. Doesn’t matter if it is Mars or a Western or Prince of Persia. Audiences just seem to HATE that brown dry desert setting.
Disney better be trucking in green bushes and sod grass onto the Lone Ranger set right now.
But didn’t Prince of Persia make a lot of money internationally (despite its soft domestic performance)?
The movie was not perfect, yet it was not a bad movie. I guess “not bad” doesn’t cut it when your budget is $250 million. What’s sad is that the below average Alice in Wonderland and the horrendous Pirates 4, both crossed the billion dollar mark. John Carter was way better than either.
agreed
that’s very true. all three are terrible, but John Carter was definitely less offensive than those two.
Only the box office gross makes one pile of shit seem to smell better than the others…but, at the end of the day…most of these films are just more of the never ending Hollywood shit storm of truly over produced/under achieving efforts for cinematic storytelling.
On the other hand, perhaps they perfectly compliment the market who watches them on their two inch cell phone screens.
Doesn’t matter how good the movie is. Nobody has interest in the story, actors, filmmakers involved. It’s a dud.
You’d have a point if we were talking just about quality (although I disagree – in John Carter the basic craftsmanship was lacking, regardless of intentions), but when it comes to BO, both Pirates 4 and Alice had what JC did not – selling power.
In a perfect world nobody would ever have to worry about that but… well, I guess you get my point.
Losing $200m is much better than saying No to Andrew Stanton, right? Right?!!!
And here you have it. Since Hollywood “circled the wagons” after the strike, it is not giving anyone not on the “list” a chance, except you know breakout geniuses like Trank LANDIS who is probably not related to his father. Stanton has no vision and built his career in a form where hundreds of people have input. So why not give him a quarter billion, he’s a genius. After all, he’s on the list.
Expect more of this. Lone Ranger will flop and the Avengers will not balance out these two bombs.
The previous regime may have greenlit the picture, but the new team had PLENTY of time to figure out how to market it and they didn’t. It was a complete and utter misfire, because, from what I’ve read (I’ve not seen the film), it was better than this performance suggests.
But, again, there was nothing out there compelling me to go in the first place.
it wasn’t better than this performance suggests.
they released it because they are a publicly traded company and they have a fiduciary responsibility to report to shareholders. Yes they could have waited for earnings…but this way they can get it baked in a bit and prevent a massive selloff at earnings announcement time.
@Joen: so, so true
@FTCS yup. you need a gasmask to watch the trailer for dark shadows it’s so stinking
He ain’t gritty no more.
Oh, come on, cut the guy some slack. Sure, his comments about “gritty” movies have been douchy, but he’s just taken his first BO flop to the face. Let’s see if that fixes his attitude first.
I couldn’t agree more!
Wait, isn’t this just Hollywood accounting at work?
Yup! Prince of Persia was considered a flop by all the wags, dummies and worse low life creatures, but after 17 weeks, the end of its theatrical run, it had taken in $335M. I read and hear more passion about John Carter than I ever did Prince of Persia. Disney should re-market to women the romance in the story and see what happens.
I’m a woman and I think Taylor Kitsch is a black hole. You can spend another $100 million on a marketing campaign aimed at me, and I still won’t go.
I predict it will be a sleeper hit on DVD/pay per view and will ultimately be remembered as a good movie with HORRIBLE marketing. The title alone was a bad sign.
So how many low-level people will get screwed because of this?
am i wrong? but that means it’s a 200 million loss as of march 31st… but the movie is still gonna make money after that… (i’m not saying profit but it’s still going to generate money) make more overseas… make more on dvd’s and tv sales in the other quarters later in the year… so i don’t think this means the film is actually losing 200 million
this was a financial statement about the first quarter that ends on march 31… but correct me if i’m wrong
I agree. I’m finding it ridiculous and very shortsighted to only look at the first week of a movie in the box office to determine if it was a success or failure. Is it done that way to placate shareholders?
Statistics have MARGINS OF ERROR. THEY ARE NOT HOW ONE SHOULD JUDGE HOW WELL A FILM WILL DO. It needs to be done via surveys of those that actually watched the films.
It’s sort of like how really unenlightened advertising companies only look at the Nielsen Ratings that don’t consider DVR viewings, streaming like Hulu (which features unskippable adverts), or word-of-mouth. It’s what killed Stargate Universe and other shows with amazing potential.
Are making long-term investments in media today considered taboo? If so, no wonder Hollywood (and by extension, the RIAA and MPAA) are losing so much ground to the internet, in which almost all theoretically-effective ways of trying to control content distribution (DRM, selected distribution services like iTunes), have been broken.
“Survey of those who went”?! Are they going to go see the film 20 more times? They’d have to survey all those who DIDN’T go, and ask them, “Hey, did you change your mind yet? You going to be seeing it anytime soon? No? OK then.”
America’s tax dollars at work! Nice write off!
Yes, if one movie loses money that can be used as a so-called “write-off” to offset profits from another, but anyone with any sense wants ALL their projects to make money (and therefore to be taxed). There is nothing nefarious about this. Even a losing movie generates a lot of tax revenue with all that money paid out in salaries and materials.
How much of the cost of John Carter was the costs of previous aborted film development rolled into the cost of this production?
Just yank John Carter out of theaters and shove it on to DVD shelves. I was sick of hearing about how it’ll bomb before it came out and how it did bomb since it came out. Sick of reading about it. I went and saw it out of curiousity and its a big mess, not terrible but didn’t add up to much, and if Taylor wasn’t as extremely hot as he is in this I woulda been more bored than I was. It felt like Green Lantern: a 3 and a half hour movie smashed into a two hour plus run time with too many cooks (or is it crooks, haha) in the kitchen.
So the idiot exec who took the words “of Mars” out of the title owes Disney 200M dollars.
Agreed.
The person who made that idiot decision was actually, Andrew Stanton. What a joke and by the way Wall-E sucked!
Yeah, Johnny Depp has no star power. None.
Alice in Wonderland: 1+ bil
Pirates 4: 1+ bil.
Z-E-R-O Box Office draw
No one said Depp’s star power did not propel both films to huge box office. The point is that his star power is fading.
Only time will tell when the results from Dark Shadows and Lone Ranger are tallied. One or both may make money with Depp, but the decline will most certainly be more defined. And, if you take out all the multi million dollar visual effects…Johnny will need to rely on finding good scripts with great characters. Look at the recent Depp films without visual effects. The Tourist, Public Enemy, and the others barely broke even or might even have lost money.
Depp is a good actor. Let’s hope he challenges those skills once again.
you’re assuming those films made money because of johnny depp and not because they were big tent-pole movies that were heavily marketed.
In most movies featuring aliens, the war is us versus them. With “John Carter” it’s them versus them. We have no investment going in.
I wonder if someone’s head is about to roll. Seems to fit the pattern: trot out the proof, then let someone go citing the massive loss statement that you just made public a week ago.
I don’t understand how they call this a write-off — when it’s still in theaters and still making money and don’t the other pictures that disney has work collectively — if they have one hit, it will offset the one making less money — this hardly a flop — it is at 180 million and counting and they got the avengers coming. Seems kinda nutty.
Oh, Jake, not again!!… You’re deluusional and your idea of John Carter being bullied is funnily enough for this comment.
O.K. Maybe there’s a possibility that JC isn’t the flop than anyone expect. But even with that, the film is losing money
The budget of the film was at least $200 million. Add to that the additional costs of advertising and distribution, and it’s even more expensive -Maybe #300 million-
-Studios don’t get all of the money from the box office. Studios generally only receive about 45% of it -Confirmed by different directors and producers-, while the rest goes to the theaters.
-The film has received a mixed reception with critics, despite a stronger fan reaction.
-Despite the money spent on -an awful- advertising, a lot of people are either unaware or uninterested in it due to the advertising.
-Mking a film for a story no one heard before since 100 years ago.
Right now, JC has $173 million worldwide. Combine this with the fact that Disney is only going to get around 45% of it, and it’s earned them less than $100 million in 11 days of release. The overseas numbers are good -Not better because in many big markets it didn’t have a huge impact-, but they won’t maintain, and will fall similar to the domestic gross. Example:
-Germany prefers “Untouchables”, a French arthouse hit is breaking records by the seventh week.
-France watches “Les Infideles”, the new film starring the Academy Award Winner Jean Dujardin.
-In Italy is in third place after an Italian production and “Untouchables”
-Even when in countries like Brazil, Spain and Australia, there are reports of big drops for JC.
The film would need to make around $500 million worldwide to break even and be considered a minor success. It probably won’t, save for some miracle. Even there’s a possibilty than JC will not become a big enough hit on DVD/Blu-Ray to make up for the losses.
P.D.: I don’t know if you are blind or work in Disney, but you need to check facts
Look at the respective fortunes of the Disney Channel to Disney features since Ross jumped over. Gary Marsh lookin’ pretty good these days.
I’m sorry, but it’s sad that a movie grossing 180 million dollars is a flop. That’s insane. Talk about fucking overproduced. If they’d cut the budget in half, they’d still have had more than twice the budget of District 9, which was also extremely FX-heavy, and also had significantly more photorealistic visual effects. There are too many cooks in the kitchen. IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. Convoluted convoluted convoluted.
Also, every single person I know who saw this movie liked it, and my crowd NEVER agrees on films. You know what they tell me immediately after saying they dug it? They go, “I mean, it fucking LOOKED stupid, but turned out to be great.” This means something.