If you are unsure what screenwriting beats are or need a quick refresher, please read my article on beats first<\/a>. Now\u2026<\/p>\n

The film John Carter was a very expensive, massive bomb in the spring of 2012, almost five years ago now. (Reading online that it was estimated this film would have needed to gross $600mm just to break even.) If you didn’t see it, that’s okay, nobody else did, either.<\/p>\n

Except I was sort of curious why it bombed so badly. Monsters on Mars? (I mean, come on who doesn\u2019t love the red planet!) Space wars? Romance? Teleportation? It all sounded like a fun space romp to me. So I TIVO’d it the other day.<\/p>\n

Not dissimilar from The Lone Ranger, another incredible bomb, the beginning of the movie was absolutely *unwatchable.* But why?<\/p>\n

The script was based on the book series of the same name (specifically, A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs)\u2014 and there we may find the first clue to what went to wrong. I haven’t read the books, but I’m guessing they tried to literally interpret the content of the books instead of doing a true filmic adaptation. Maybe that explains why the film version was horrible.<\/p>\n

However, not all of the movie was horrible. I thought once we got past Act 1 and into Act 2 it started becoming decidedly more watchable.\u00a0So, really, the complete and total error in judgment was in the crafting of Act 1.<\/p>\n

Go on to Part 2 of this post, the analysis of beats.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you are unsure what screenwriting beats are or need a quick refresher, please read my article on beats first. Now\u2026 The film John Carter was a very expensive, massive bomb in the spring of 2012, almost five years ago now. (Reading online that it was estimated this film would have needed to gross $600mm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,81,119,128,9,116,7,12,10,6,50,42,44,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adapting","category-audience","category-beat-sheet","category-beats","category-character","category-concept","category-genre","category-location","category-logical-world","category-story","category-subject-matter","category-theme","category-tone","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1079,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions\/1079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screenwriter-to-screenwriter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}