It’s not necessarily fair to be so down on John Carter for having a boring, bland trailer when this is so clearly the kind of movie built on spectacle that takes a while to accomplish. Like Green Lantern, it’s likely that later trailers will be much more interesting as the special effects start coming in and it becomes more obvious how Disney has spent as much or more money on this then pretty much any other movie they’ve ever made. All that said, it still looks like we’re facing a dustier version of Tron: Legacy: big expensive Disney flick that isn’t going to pull the kind of numbers they want, even with a giant, four-armed, white space ape…
Don’t worry John, the clone army is on its way to save you.
This is a still that comes along with an EW interview with director Andrew Stanton, who gives some context to this cinematic version of one of the book’s beasts…
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So tell me about these White Apes in your film. They’re from the books, but I recall they’re not quite this ginormous?
DREW STANTON: No, they’re sort of an oversized gorilla in the books, and they’re kind of ubiquitous. They’re littered everywhere through at least the first several novels. They were always cool, just from a visceral standpoint, [but] they don’t really have a narrative function in the first book. So what we did is we made the White Apes a formidable creature that you kind of hear about throughout the movie, but you never really witness. There’s a subtle sense of anticipation for what these things might be like. Then Michael Kutsche — who did a lot of the designs on [the Johnny Depp movie] Alice in Wonderland – came up with this design on his own, for just their scale. He made them nocturnal, almost like moles — they stopped using their eyes, and just had a heightened sense of smell. We just love that. We needed a scene where Carter was going have to get out of his execution sentence in order to move the story forward, and we thought what better than having to go up against this formidable creature?
I have no doubt we’ll end up seeing exactly where the money on this movie went, but I can’t shake the hunch that this is going to be a big disappointment for Disney.
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(via /Film)