JOHN CARTER Extended Super Bowl Spot Even More Epic Scope

Out of the all the films advertised during last night’s Super Bowl, I think the two that will have the hardest time convincing the public to show up at the theaters are Battleship and Disney’s John Carter. I’ve already discussed the disconnect between the board game it is based on and what people saw in the Battleship trailer. And I think that ironically, John Carter faces the exact opposite problem – People won’t recognize the name, but probably have seen a number of story elements in the movie before. That’s because the 1920s pulp novels by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs that the film is derived from are pretty much an unknown to the general public. But science-fiction filmmakers have been raiding the books for ideas for decades. I sort of wish that Disney’s marketing people were pushing the fact that this guy is one of the original science fantasy/space opera heroes in their advertising. They have less than a month to go to make people realize that they need to go see this film and I’m not sure that just showing that the story has an even wider scope than what they have revealed before is going to do the trick.