John Carter

Andrew Stanton’s 2012 film drops a cavalry officer out of the American civil war onto Mars. It was Stanton’s first live action picture after Finding Nemo and WALL-E, written with Mark Andrews and revised by Michael Chabon. Burroughs called the 1912 novel A Princess of Mars; the closing card still says John Carter of Mars. The four armed Tharks were built in the computer, but their actors were on set. Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, Thomas Haden Church and Polly Walker played opposite the human cast on stilts at Thark height, faces recorded by two cameras on a head harness. No full body motion capture happened on set; crowd cycles were generated separately. One method was tried and dropped: a real camel was captured in markers for the Thoat mounts, then live camels were judged too risky around the actors, and the gait survived only as reference. A good fit if you care where actors are actually looking around giant creatures, since the Thark players stood there on stilts. Not for you if you are opening it for the biggest flop in history headline: Disney’s own statement of 19 March 2012 put its studio segment quarterly operating loss at 80 to 120 million dollars, estimates of the total loss vary widely, and the film took 211.1 million dollars outside North America.