John Carter with Matt Singer

9:45David Sims:It is from Bones Coffee Company.

9:48Griffin Newman:Yeah.

9:49David Sims:Web Slinger Crispy Marshmallow Treat Flavored Coffee. It's a great looking bag. It's a great bag. Excellent bag. Good packaging. And I'd say Spider-Man's a good guy. One of my favorite guys. He's one of our best. Yes. One of your good friends. Yes. As far as the flavor profile, how is this representative of Spider-Man? It's a great question. Because it's marshmallow and marshmallow treats look like webs. Sticky marshmallow, webs. I guess you're right. There's a walk. Sticky. Sticky is what we're going with. It's sticky. It's a short swing to sticky. Yes. Okay. Yeah. It's not the worst coffee I've ever had.

10:24It's not. It isn't as bad as I feared when we smelled it. Will we serve it to anyone else? No. Oh, I'm sure you won't. No, you won't. I would not serve this to someone unless they want it. Because I'm going to drink all of it.

10:34Griffin Newman:Yeah. Exactly. You're taking it home.

10:35David Sims:You're just going to eat the grounds. Yes. You're not even going to pour water over it. This is, of course, because our guest today, returning to the show, wrote the book on Spider-Man. Proper title? A book on Spider-Man. Marvel's Spider-Man, colon, from amazing to spectacular, extra colon, the definitive comic art collection. Hell yes. wrote a book on Siskel and Ebert, Opposable Thumbs. That's right. Colon, How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever. Gotta have colons in your books. And of course, the way they changed movies forever is that they influenced Ben Hosley to recommend that we call this podcast Griffel and Simsburg.

11:10Yes, right. I probably knew that story.

11:13David Sims:Long ago. And the upcoming book. Yes. Here it is. Copy on task. Yes, I have. Uncorrected proof or corrected proof? It's an uncorrected proof. I've already corrected things that are in this version. Funny Business. That's right. The subtitle is The Old School Wedding Crashers and Knocked Up Virgins Who Changed Comedy Forever. And the book, of course, is about failed sci-fi franchises of the 2010s. That's right. That's right. I don't know if we want to get into this now, but while we're talking about this book, I'm going to hand it to you. Yes. The Great Matt Singer. Hi, Matt Singer. Welcome. Thank you.

11:46Now, if you look in the back of the book, there is a bookmarked part. There's a post-it. I want you to look what's right above the post-it in the footnotes.

11:57David Sims:Wow. Footnote number 58. Quote, in any minute, Griffin Newman and David Sims host Blank Check with Griffin and David podcast, The Big Lebowski with Seth Rogen. You're a quoted source in my book. Because Rogen was dropping bombs. He was. And it has a typed out link, a URL. Yes, if people want to go fact check it themselves, they can go listen. It was an excellent—I just happened to be working on that part of the book. And I was listening to him and he's talking about working on the 40 year old virgin, which I was working on that part of the book. Perfect quotes. Oh, you can have you can have that.

12:31This is a you can be shared by the. Yeah, we got a couple of copies so you guys can enjoy that.

12:36David Sims:It is a thing I always will take any opportunity to bring up on the show that I often complain about the death of the theatrical studio comedy. But I think in people trying to do the post-mortems, there is not enough study of what happened in comedy from like 2000 to 2015. Well, this is the book for you. I've been waiting for this book, but it really did build up in a way that was kind of MCU-esque. Yeah. There was a sort of, like, franchise machinery to the way the personas got built and the cross-pollination and the rise of the sort of star producer and all that kind of stuff. And it happened kind of, you mentioned the MCU, and it kind of happened around the tail end of this wave coincides with it, and I think very much of that and the cinematic universification of Hollywood had a big effect on why these movies started to go away.

13:36David Sims:But I also think quietly those movies and the modern franchises pulled from what was working there. I have always said that there was something that I think, whether consciously or unconsciously, that was wisely pulled from how Apatow seeded performers in supporting roles to prep you for them in leading roles.

13:56Griffin Newman:Right, and then he, right. I feel like while he's doing that, they're like on set being like, an interesting story in my life. And he's like, I love that. work on that write me a script you could turn that into a movie

14:07David Sims:but also once this thing worked there was a house style there was a sensibility for sure there was a low concept this is about interpersonal relationships find a very specific dynamic and then what started to piss people off is these movies are all the same it's improv runs it's an awkward romantic comedy about a dude who's the one who has to learn silly boy shrewish lady which I argue is kind of what's happening with Marvel now where it's like we know the format

14:33Griffin Newman:but 10 years ago at this point but yes um i mean it's just maybe marvel you know it's impossible though just thinking about marvel it's like yeah like if marvel was like we did something totally different people would just be like like no right like it's hard it's hard the movie does not fully

14:51David Sims:work you and i both quietly partially defend it but that's what eternals was trying to do i agree with that eternals was i think feige wisely saying we need to fucking mix it up because people are going to start getting tired of this quick. And then they did not find the right way to mix it up. Right. And they took the rejection of that really hard and were like, back to the old shit. Right. Yes, it was a retreat. It was a swift retreat.

15:14Griffin Newman:I just, this is on my mind because I just filed a review of Over Your Dead Body, the Hormat Ticcone movie that is like, that didn't totally work for me. I don't know if either of you have seen it. I have not seen it yet. But like, you know, I thought it was okay and like had some stuff. And of course stars Jason Segel. Yes. And I was like, Siegel is like the last of those guys, right? Who is still making like movie star comedies into the mid 2010s. After sex tape, he's released zero movies wide in theaters. Right. Zero. Yes. Like he's made a couple indies that got a theatrical release. It's like end of the tour.

15:48Griffin Newman:End of the tour.

15:48David Sims:There's the Carly McDowell movie.

15:49Griffin Newman:End of the tour. And I have it here. And Our Friend. Yeah. Are the only ones that were even like indie releases. Everything else was Netflix, which is Discovery, Come Sunday, Sky is Everywhere, where he had a supporting role, which was on Apple, Windfall. So three of those were like Charlie McDowell movies. And now this Overeign Dead Body is getting a tiny release as well. I know Seagull also kind of was like, I'm burned out. I don't like making these sex tape, bad teacher movies anymore.

16:20David Sims:Get sober, has a sort of kind of like, I need to pull away and work on my shit.

16:24Griffin Newman:But like post, you know, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, he did for years. Like he did the kind of like, yeah, I'll do a high concept sort of R-rated comedy for you every so often. And he was also.

16:34David Sims:And they would like do all right. He was often writing them or co-writing them. Yeah, he was involved. Like he is a writer on sex tape. Like sex tape wasn't just a sort of like, fuck it, I'll take the paycheck. No. And five year engagement. And it's just crazy. Muppets he co-writes. Yeah.

16:48Griffin Newman:And, you know, yeah, he has like five or six, you know, of those.

16:53David Sims:But even like Bad Teacher and I Love You Man. And like he was getting plugged in. I Love You Man. Yes. That's a good one.

16:59Griffin Newman:And then Sex Tape is just like, you know, I remember when it came out, everyone was like, you know, is this a movie? Like, is this a big concert? Like, everyone's a little. No one was like, this sucks.

17:09David Sims:No. But everyone was like, eh. It was one of those movies where it's like, this thing is ending. Right. And the problem is that if you look at.

17:16Griffin Newman:And like the poster's just them going like, huh? Like, you know, it's like the laziest photo. They're like looking at an iPad.

17:21David Sims:It also felt like we had come all the way around to like the Apatow wave is a correction for how high concept star comedies had become. They'd gotten really big budget. It was 20 million dollar stars who felt like they were kind of lazily picking up a paycheck for like a one sentence movie pitch where the title is the premise. And there's usually magic or something like that or insane mistaken identity. And then it was like, let's bring this down to like human level. and sex tape felt like the first comedy that was an output, an extended reach of the Apatow family tendrils.

17:56Griffin Newman:Yeah.

17:56David Sims:Where the concept was like, what?

17:58Griffin Newman:Right. Does this make sense? Yes.

17:59David Sims:They uploaded the sex tape to their personal cloud, but they gave everyone in their life an iPad for Christmas. Yes. And those iPads are on their cloud, so their mailman has their sex tape. We've all been there. Right. You're like, it's getting too sweaty here. Very relatable. But that movie also made like 50 million domestic. Yeah, I think it did. All right. I can look up the final number. You like to think of it as a disaster. And you're like, it ended up with a number pretty similar.

18:26Griffin Newman:It made 126 worldwide. I mean. Which means it made, yeah, it made 40 domestic and 90 international.

18:34David Sims:Yeah.

18:34Griffin Newman:The international market. They love sex tapes.

18:36David Sims:They love sex tapes. It's a fascinating thing to talk about. Yes. Today we're talking about John Carter because this is a podcast. One of the most famous R-rated sex comedies of the 2000s. Well, I think this is an opportunity to really just discuss what was happening in the movies in the early 2010s. And the Apatow stuff is part and parcel with it, right? True. Bridesmaids is 2011. That is arguably the apex of the whole thing. Yes. That is the highest grossing Apatow movie.

19:04Griffin Newman:It's the highest grossing and it is like it's somehow even though the formula had been set already. when that was released, people, there was still the narrative like, is this too risky? Like, all girls are rated. Like, is anyone going to go for this?

19:19David Sims:It was a successful Eternals.

19:22Griffin Newman:Yes. Yeah. Right? I'm sure they would love that comparison. We're switching it up a bit. Yeah.

19:26David Sims:Yes. Which, of course, then leads to Ghostbusters, the unsuccessful Eternals of this experiment. Right? That's an interesting comparison. Yes. A beginning of the end movie, right? Oh, yes. Well, I think it had already, they were already on the downward slope, but that was a real yes. This movie comes out in March, released by, as I said before, the Walt Disney company.

19:50Griffin Newman:What are they? Are they like a new indie shingle or something at that time? Yeah. They're like a utopia. And it's being released right now. Catch up entertainment. It's being released by Marvel basically as they are, like, the ink is beginning to dry on their Marvel acquisition. right like when is that when do they buy marvel 2012 oh no this is the timeline i was gonna say right so this film is released march 2012 right may is avengers yeah which was did that movie do it it did in fact quite well right uh i believe almost as good as john carter yes okay so 2008

20:30David Sims:is iron man and the incredible hulkers 2010 is iron man 2 and i believe after the release of Iron Man 2, Disney buys Marvel. Now, the original Paramount deal that was similar to the original Pixar Disney deal, this is a five-film slate distribution, you own underlying rights, was supposed to be Iron Man, Incredible Hulk. I think Ant-Man was supposed to be part of that original five. Iron Man 2 takes that slot, and then, of course, Incredible Hulk ended up being universal because of them having the original rights. Thor, Captain America, Avengers. Avengers.

21:06Griffin Newman:Griffin, it's universal because Hulk is green and universal is our planet, which is also very green.

21:11David Sims:Unless we don't take care of it, like in WALL-E. President Hulk, please salute. They buy it in 2010. 2011, Paramount releases Captain America and Thor, but Disney now owns Marvel and is starting to message those characters as, these are ours, but you still are distributing them. Both of those movies do well. not like absurdly well but well and then Disney spends an extraordinary amount of money in my memory it was 500 million dollars to buy Paramount out of Avengers and Iron Man 3

21:48Griffin Newman:and that was a good deal

21:50David Sims:we can't wait we just need it now and Avengers comes out three months after this two months after this and just blows the doors off everything and now it's just like this is what the future is it's over I think that's important context because, you know, we've already alluded to the marketing of John Carter. Yeah. That perhaps offers a potential explanation in that they were already looking at the Avengers. They're distracted. There are a lot of explanations for what went wrong in the marketing of this movie, but it was well sort of discussed. By the time this movie was coming out, Disney didn't need this to be a franchise anymore.

22:29David Sims:Because what's the other thing that happened? In fall of 2011, Walt Disney completes its purchase of Lucasfilm. That is true. They really, they really, they made a couple goodbyes. In 2011, Disney buys Marvel and Lucasfilm, and this movie is just kind of a dead man walking. I'm not saying they, like, set it up to fail because there was so much money at stake that everyone would have been happier if this had been successful. Right. But already they were sort of like, we have the two surest bets in Hollywood. This is not necessary. And this is coming at the end of a journey that brings you the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

23:11David Sims:We can't let that franchise rest. We need another action franchise. Jack is back, right? Prince of Persia. Right. Tron legacy. I'm sorry.

23:22Griffin Newman:The funniest thing Disney Plus did to me when I finished John Carter was shrink the credits and be like, are you ready for Prince of Persia? I was like, buddy, come on.

23:32David Sims:But they really, and Long Ranger. Long Ranger is the other one which comes after this. They're really looking for that audience. And they've already, as you're saying, they have already acquired the two locks on that audience. They couldn't have any bigger lock on that audience. And so, yes, poor John Carter is going, what about me? They kept trying to launch or relaunch something, either their own IP that they had or pull IP from somewhere else that they thought had some history and some built in audience. And then they just bought the two things where they were like, you did the work for us.

24:06David Sims:You primed the pump. The audience is there. You made those movies. This is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever. crazy passion projects they want and sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby rarely has that intro applied more thoroughly to this the filmmaker we're discussing and the film we're talking about today is a movie that feels like it has been fated to be discussed on this podcast from the moment we decided this is what the podcast was this movie bounced similar to how

24:43Griffin Newman:john carter can jump correct great like a great flea yes yeah yeah yes and it is a movie that has

24:49David Sims:become like a historic signpost.

24:52Griffin Newman:Historic signpost in terms of like where franchises went and where blockbusters went or?

24:58David Sims:This is what I think is interesting to discuss. This movie's release was greeted with a sort of like, well, never again, lessons learned. And I would argue Hollywood continued to basically take the wrong lessons from this movie and also repeat its mistakes in a lot of ways. I think watching this movie now a film I kind of defend and enjoy watching while not wholly successful it does feel like the world is a little kinder to this film today in contrast because other movies have gotten so much sloppier in trying to do the same thing

25:36Griffin Newman:I think it is a a largely good looking movie given this what it's trying to accomplish the scale of what it's working with I do think it's an unsuccessful film. I think it is a on paper, just like we stacked up all the little numbers here and it is not successful.

25:53David Sims:Here's my one counterpoint. Go ahead. I don't think this movie really functions in the way it wants to. Even though it has moments, it has spurts, the engine will start up and then it will sputter again. I do find this movie more cohesive in feeling kind of like there is a vision that is executed here versus what I'd say a lot of these similar franchise movies that we get today where the story is they reshot all of this three times and you feel it.

26:24Griffin Newman:What are you thinking of? I think like what are you holding it against here?

26:28David Sims:Like basically every Marvel movie.

26:30Griffin Newman:Name movies.

26:32David Sims:Rise of Skywalker.

26:33Griffin Newman:no but okay no but that that's different like that sequels to me that's a different kind of mess i mean rise of skywalker i can someone please write the tell all can we just get or can everyone just sit down and be like i'll admit it yeah it was a completely different movie that was also bad yes and then we we panicked and turned it into that movie i know none of it makes sense i'm fully aware like you know what let's sit down and watch it and i'll pause and i'll tell you like yep this was shot one year after this and i know that you know like that's completely i'm trying to think of like the franchise star all right the movie i compared this to the entire time i was watching this time is avatar yeah because i was basically just like avatar makes none of the mistakes and this movie makes most of them and it is crazy that this film

27:18David Sims:bombed this hard coming out three years after avatar and is kind of really two years because

27:24Griffin Newman:it's like yeah when you think about december march so it's really just a couple years it's really still like in the wake of Avatar. It starts production before Avatar is released. Right. It can't watch what they're doing. Not that copying James Cameron is easy or whatever.

27:39David Sims:And I think basically anytime in history a movie is like an out-of-the-box, out-of-the-blue hit that big and the studios rush to find the copycats, it doesn't work. You look at the wave of post-Lord of the Rings. Yeah. What else can we adapt? This shit doesn't work. But the fact that it was... It's inevitable. Everyone's gonna try. A little parallel thinking and they had a movie that could have been sold as like, here's the thing that inspired Avatar. It's kind of like Avatar. A human guy goes to Earth and romances an alien. You can't find an interview with Andrew Stanton about this movie where either he doesn't mention Avatar or someone asks him about Avatar.

28:12It's just in the wind. It's unavoidable. It is unavoidable.

28:15David Sims:It's the highest grossing film of all time when this movie's coming out. About a fucking guy going to a new planet where he doesn't know the rules. Right, and he falls in love. And it's an epic romance. And there's a war of civilizations. And there's tall aliens that are another color. Yeah. Oh, but what he was animal like space animals. And what he'll always say is that this avatar was inspired by this. No shit. Yeah, true. This is so much their their marketing and what he his sales pitch to people was everything you love is inspired by what I made. There's a great quote where and we'll get into all the previous versions of this movie that almost happened and didn't going all the way back to the 1940s.

28:54David Sims:Robert Zemeckis, they tried to sell him on doing it for Disney, I think, when Zemeckis bought the rights in the 90s. And he hadn't read the books. And I believe either Katzenberg or Eisner gives him the book to read it over. And he gets back to them and he goes, I can't make this. Lucas already plundered everything good from it.

29:11Griffin Newman:It totally makes total sense, of course. Like the inspirations. It's kind of like Dune was as well. Where like, yeah, it's hard to crack it when it's already been like little bits have been taken out of it for all the movies we like. It's their main argument for why they make this movie like an Andrew Stanton. And it is a flawed argument because, yes, it's already been, yes, strip mined for everything that's good. And just because something is the first does not necessarily make it the best, especially when it's made as early as this is in the history of this kind of story.

29:44David Sims:There's a lot of iteration that is helpful.

29:46Griffin Newman:Have any of us, I know Ben's read all of the Barsim series. Have you ever read the? I've read the first book. Right. Which is an iconic sci-fi work. Sure. Like, but in that way of like, you read it and you're like, it's so interesting how ideas were generated here that get built on by other works and all that stuff. But it's also pretty rough. It's a little rough. And a little weird. There's not a lot of a story. Right. Right. Which this movie struggles with that by grafting on this, you know, certain elements, which I would assume, having not read the later books, are in the later books. I don't know that they are.

30:25They might be a little bit invented. I think it's pretty invented. Yes. I mean, the therns, another silly word that we're going to have to say a lot. Yeah, I'm going to say it every two minutes. The therns are in later books. They are not in the original book. The ninth ray, which is a not silly word, but it sounds silly when they say it a lot. The ninth ray, that in the book is not a... Now, in this movie, it is like an all-consuming death ray. It can do anything. And in the book, again, maybe in later books it becomes that. In the first book, it is kind of a MacGuffin of there's artificial atmosphere on Mars.

31:06and the ninth ray is what creates air inside an atmosphere factory. These are all things that they took out of the movie. But that is not this laser that you can zap at people and a magical globe.

31:22Griffin Newman:The powers are too powerful. I was really struggling with that thing. I was like, you can't do anything with this thing. This is a huge problem with this movie is that they made it a story about shape-shifting weirdos who have an all-powerful ray, which can kill anyone instantly. And the alternate force has a guy who can jump really high. And people are so excited to get John Carter on their side. Like, literally, there's a scene where, like, where Tars Tarkas is accusing Deja Thorne. She's like, you want this weapon for yourself, but he fights for the Tharks! And you're going, he's, it's like, he's literally a guy who can jump high.

32:04He can jump away from battle.

32:05Griffin Newman:He can jump high. He can jump high. And I guess he can kill like 1 ,000 people if they try to hurt him. If he remembers his dead wife. Yes, right. If he remembers burying a family. Another thing.

32:16David Sims:The opposite of a mother gaining strength when her child is in danger. That's right. He can get stronger if he remembers. This is another thing that's not in the book. The family he didn't protect. Totally invented for the movie is to give him a tragic Hollywood backstory of my wife and child were killed. And I no longer want to fight. Right. He doesn't have a cause. In the books, he doesn't, right, in the movie. Yeah. In the book, he not only doesn't have a tragic backstory, he's like, and this is another thing that's in the book that is not in the movie, is like, he's almost like a Highlander.

32:47He's like immortal. He talks about how, like, I don't remember my childhood. I've always been 30 years old. I am as old as, you know, like, I can't age. I've watched other people. Maybe that gets addressed later.

32:58David Sims:But it's also, look, it's like the Superman thing, right? Where when the character is created, the pitch of what if a guy was so fucking awesome was all you needed to get people to lean in? And then Superman over decades is iterated to become more relatable. Totally.

33:14Griffin Newman:Let's give him a childhood. Let's give him family. Let's make this make sense.

33:18David Sims:And John Carter is still kind of stuck in his original state, which is just what if a guy fucking ruled? Right. He doesn't need anything going on inside of him. And again, in the Burroughs book, he's he's a warrior. He can jump. He is strong because of the density of his bones and the Martian whatever. But he's fighting other people with swords. It's like, you know, it's like, what if we drop this super cool warrior into the middle of a giant battle? OK. But in the movie, they're like, what if that was happening? But also there was death rays. It's like, again, it's just. Yeah, it's not. It's not even a knife to a gunfight.

33:51It's a guy with good legs at a death laser fight.

33:55David Sims:So there's stuff where I'm like he was making the right choices and he didn't get all the way there in terms of like, OK, so how do you give this like an emotional spine? In the books, John Carter fights for the South and he's a good soldier. And he's like, well, I can't build a fucking two hundred and fifty million dollar Disney movie around a like loyal Confederate. Right. So let me make it that he fought for the South, but it was against his will and he like defected and was fighting against them. So then it kind of neutralizes him. Well, why is that the case? Because he lost his family in the war.

34:31David Sims:So he's become so disillusioned. Oh, that means he doesn't want to fight. So once he gets to Barsoom, he's reluctant. You're like, we're getting there. Yeah, it could work. Yeah. It's not a terrible idea. I just, yeah.

34:44Griffin Newman:I'm sorry. I'm browsing the encyclopedia Barsoomia right now, which is, of course, the name of the John Carter wiki. Yes. But yes. Did you have to drink magic liquid to comprehend this language? We all did. Oh, that's what was in there. Now we're speaking Barsoomian. The therns, I think, are very different in the books. They're not in the first book. They're not in it at all, no. They're introduced later, but they are more just kind of like an old, you know, kind of like ancient Greek style, I think, like the original civilization of Mars. there's also black martians there's other to them races of martians here i feel like we have like green and red right that's basically it and they mentioned yeah and they mentioned the white apes which i i i guess are the the thing he fights in the arena those are the big guy right monsters but they're not that important to the to the story um but the idea that they're like interstellar caretakers that's not in the books it's at least not in the first one according to the encyclopedia of Arsumi, it's a Disney film invention.

35:48Griffin Newman:Okay. So are the books still relevant? What do you mean by relevant? I mean, they're relevant to my life. I try to live my life by their teachings.

35:57David Sims:They're relevant historically. This is a lot of what this movie came up against, is like Andrew Stanton was pushing really hard to be like, this is the definitive text. Like, all modern sci-fi adventure storytelling comes from this. Which is true. Which is right. It's not raw. The notion of making this, it's not even like Dune where it's like they've never gotten it right. It was no one has ever succeeded in getting to the starting line of making a movie about this. So it's going to be greeted with such excitement of they're finally fucking doing it. Right. And what he overstated was... But who?

36:29David Sims:Exactly. Yes. Well, there you go. That's the problem. That was the problem

36:33Griffin Newman:they ran into. But yeah, I just like, is this like a thing that sci-fi fans are like? This starts out

36:41David Sims:as a story serialized in pulp magazines in 1912. So the movie is coming out 100 years after it is published.

36:50Griffin Newman:This is dusty. Dune is dusty, but Dune is dusty. I think their notion was

36:58David Sims:everyone's waiting for this. And in reality what it had become was this is the thing that all of the people who made the sci-fi you actually like grew up reading. And to general audiences this only is really of interest to like hard big nerds or old people i guess yeah but i'd say like in modern audiences it was like if you are a voracious reader and you're really interested in the history of science fiction and being able to like retrace the threads back to the beginning it's sort of like it's like saying to someone this is the video game that inspired it all and then making someone play pong in 2026 it's like

37:36Griffin Newman:okay well it's historically important but updated pong with like some backstory you know right or Or would I rather play that or would I rather play my PlayStation? I think I have a clear choice. You knew the ball in Pong had a family that died. Keep going.

37:53David Sims:It's like making the Pong movie based off the logic of, did you see how much money Super Mario Galaxy just made? Right. That wasn't even the first video game. We're going to make Pong.

38:04Griffin Newman:I love the work of Bruce Covill. I bring it up on this podcast a lot. the young adult author who was like, Aliens Ate My Homework, my teacher flunked the planet and all that shit. And he references John Carter of Mars in those books and it clearly was an inspiration for him. Yeah. And I would, as a kid, read that and he'd be like, yeah, and my character, the character would be like, I love John Carter books like the guy who wrote Tarzan. And I'd be like, that's interesting. Never wanted to read them. You know what I mean? I definitely. Never like, I knew they existed but I was never like, I should pluck those

38:36David Sims:off the shelves. I absolutely plucked it off the shelves. He plucked it. And was like, this is dense. I can't get into this.

38:41Griffin Newman:Right, because it's like an early 1900s serial novel. I mean, like, I haven't read the fucking Tarzan books either. No, but Tarzan as a cultural idea persists in a way that John Carter doesn't.

38:52David Sims:And you'll be in our heart. Absolutely. That's the thing. Like, how many people are reading Tarzan books today? I don't know. But everyone knows what Tarzan is. And John Carter only exists as, like, the thing that he influenced in the public conscience.

39:06Griffin Newman:I feel like we must open the dossier just because there is reams of context to dig for. On this one, I said it was going to be a short dossier. There's not much. J.J. wants to shout out at the top of the dossier because he used so much stuff. There's a Drew Taylor piece in March 2022. The 10-year anniversary. That went through everything in the anniversary. There's also a tad friend profile of Stanton. Second act twist. In October 2011 that's like leading up to the release of John Carter.

39:32David Sims:Cannot strongly enough, and this is the only time I feel like I'm actually issuing homework to our listeners. It is worth reading both of these things in full. We will pull out strands of them. But the one piece is as the movie's about to come out, and it's sort of talking about Stanton's history, his success up until this point, the trepidation from Disney. You know, it's right at the crossroads right before the thing finally, like, implodes. and then the 10 years later piece has people speaking very openly in retrospect about everything that happened.

40:05Griffin Newman:We'll have links to both articles in the episode description. But both really well written thorough pieces. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author who goes best with, you know, chicken. Sure. Maybe a steak, if you want steak and rice.

40:19David Sims:I was going to say, call him Ned. Right, call him Ned. I thought you were talking about the character in this motion picture. Oh, what a great character

40:25Griffin Newman:played by the great Daryl Sabara.

40:27David Sims:Can I reveal something? The spy kid, please.

40:28Griffin Newman:Did you audition for this?

40:29David Sims:I did. We got to put it in the can, and this is a movie covered on the show that I auditioned for. Has Sabara beaten you out for multiple roles? I feel like that's come up before. Oh, boy. That's a good question. Let me look it up while you continue through the dossier. This is the only one I remember. Oh, no. He got the part in fucking It's Complicated. That's what I was thinking about. That then was cut out. Right, right. But the one I auditioned for like four times. That part was nemesis. That part was so complicated. It was very complicated. There was a whole extended scene at the beginning of It's Complicated that was Meryl Streep hits it off with a guy in a dating app and then she goes and it's a high school student.

41:01David Sims:Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

41:01Griffin Newman:Which is a good gag. Right. Yeah. And it was

41:04David Sims:Daryl Svaro was the ultimate. Filming of the movie was pushed back twice because Nancy couldn't find the right casting for that role and the entire thing was removed. But yes, I auditioned for that role multiple times.

41:16Griffin Newman:1912 he releases their stories called Under the Moons of Mars in the magazine All-Star Story. Then collected is the novel The Princess of Mars in 1917. Published after Tarzan, the success of Tarzan. It's kind of his blank check project. Well, the story, I think, is before. The story's before, the novel is after. Because it starts serializing. He writes 10 more novels in the Barsoom series after that. Yes. I was just going to say, I think this is the first thing he ever wrote. He was like, he had other odd jobs. Right, right, right, right. And then A Princess of Mars in the serialized form was his first thing he wrote.

41:51Griffin Newman:I mean, he wrote so many other fantasy series that I don't know much about. Like there's the Pelucidar, which is like in a hollow earth kind of series. There's this thing called the Venus series, which is kind of like, you know, you hit it with Mars, next stop Venus, right? Like I haven't read those. So 1931, Looney Tunes animator Bob Clampett. Legend. A true legend. So much that even I've heard of him. Yes. Is like, what if we turn these into a cartoon? The Barsoom books, like they're so popular and they create test footage a year before the release of Snow White that freaks people out and doesn't get turned into a feature.

42:33Griffin Newman:It's really realistic. The footage is amazing. Is it like rotoscopes? They were drawing off of live action stuff.

42:41David Sims:You know, Snow White uses a lot of rotoscoping. Like the early Disney princess movies until they start getting more stylized with Sleeping Beauty and such. Most of the human characters would be rotoscoped. And then the animals and the dwarves and everything were more stylish. It looks unbelievable. Yeah. It was kind of so technically ahead of what anyone was doing at the time. And it's one of those things since it was before Snow White where you're like, if that's completed, does it kind of change the trajectory of animation to some degree? Because you have the 2000s, late 90s, early 2000s run that also I feel like is relevant to this movie of like Atlantis, Treasure Planet.

43:22David Sims:Yeah, right. Titan A.D. Pulpy, serial, sci-fi. Where they were like, Can we use animation to make cool shit for boys? Yeah, with like a sort of a steampunk. How do we break out of it just being princess musicals? And it is like 2D animation because of Snow White and the impact becomes princess musicals and talking animals primarily is what is thought of. But yes, the Clampett tests are unbelievable.

43:42Griffin Newman:They're very cool. You can check out YouTube.

43:47David Sims:There's little bits and pieces. Yeah. It's very cool. Bob Clampett just want to shout out, created Beanie and Cecil, which is one of my favorite cartoon shows as a kid. an old dusty cartoon show that was based on what used to be a local TV puppet show he did when he was young. Old dinosaur. And the Clampett family like puts out Beanie and Cecil DVD compilations because I think they own the rights. And that's how I first found out that he tried to do John Carter because the DVD just had like 30 minutes of John Carter shit in the special features including those tests.

44:16Griffin Newman:Ray Harryhausen in the 50s supposedly expressed some interest in like a stop motion Barsoom thing. Makes perfect sense. Does make sense. Seems like his kind of thing. also never really gained much momentum. My guess is that every time, like, the enormous amount of money would be required, even for something animated or stop, people would just kind of be like, I think this is too weird.

44:33David Sims:This is what sells it until Stanton does it. But you look at, like, animation's the only way you could do this. You couldn't do it in live action, right? They missed the window for animation. Now the idea of doing a serious, realistic action movie in animation is unfathomable in the 30s, 40s, 50s, right? Harryhausen creates, you know, his style of stop-motion special effects and how to blend it with live action. Okay, this makes sense. This is a way you could possibly adapt these. He can't crack it. And now it's like on the table again until effects evolve in the 80s.

45:05Griffin Newman:In the 80s, right. Mario Kassar and Andrew Vanya, the Karolko guys, bring it to Disney. Katzenberg is young at Disney. He wants to do it. The Fly's Charles Pogue and Tales from the Crypt's Terry Black. These are screenwriters. Take a shot. Katzenberg basically is like, we want this to be our Star Wars.

45:25David Sims:Yeah. And this is Katzenberg and Eisner coming in after Disney has had the failed run of Black Hole, Tron, etc.

45:34Griffin Newman:Black says, you know, they wanted the story to be dramatic. The book has this very leisurely pace. And, you know, we just clashed a lot over, like, how much of the book do you throw out? Ted Elliott and Terry Rocio, who are, like, kings of Disney in the 90s, they took a crack at it. John McTiernan and Tom Cruise starts circling in 1990, brings in Bob Gale. Gale is then replaced by Sam Resnick, who had written a TV Robin Hood that McTiernan had produced. Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts were supposedly courted to star. I don't know how intensely involved they were.

46:11David Sims:But in 1990, the pitch of Zemeckis, Gale, Roberts, Cruise makes perfect sense. you can like imagine the alternate reality where that movie exists. Definitely.

46:23Griffin Newman:But McTiernan wisely and quickly is like, this is just too expensive. We can't pull this off yet. And then very wisely is like, I'll make Last Action Hero. Yes. That'll go. That'll go great for me. That one will be easy. Karolko goes bankrupt. Then Jim Jax, James Jax, Kevin Smith's buddy, who we've been revoked on this podcast. Sure. and Harry Knowles,

46:47David Sims:who I guess is a huge fan of this. Yes, and in his biography, kept talking about what an influence it was for him. He like beats the drum for it. And this is when Harry Knowles is still seen as... He's got the nerd touch. He has the magic touch. He can see what they want. Beyond the idea that he's a kingmaker, there was this thing of, if Harry Knowles is saying it, does it mean that there are millions of silent nerds we don't realize are dying for this movie? He speaks for the internet. This starts to create the false sense, Ben, to your earlier question of are people waiting for this film? Who wants this?

47:19David Sims:No, but like, do we not realize it that everyone wants this? Yes. So yes, Jim Jax.

47:24Griffin Newman:Jim Jax brings in Mark Protosevich, I think is his name, the guy who wrote The Cell. He was kind of like a hot guy back then. Robert Rodriguez is going to direct it. Robert Rodriguez has resigned from the DGA because of Sin City.

47:38David Sims:And let's call out, here's the other technological breakthrough. They're like,

47:42Griffin Newman:he wants to do his Sin City thing. Green screen.

47:45David Sims:Is this a way to make this fucking work now? Can you do green screen, stylize, build an extensive world without having to build crazy sets and photorealistic aliens or whatever? Paramount doesn't want to work with him for this reason.

47:59Griffin Newman:He's not in the DGA. So they fire him, and who makes sense as the obvious next choice? We'll get to him, but I do want to note the thing that Matt said already. If they do throw it, Jax does throw it to Zemeckis, and Zemeckis does say the thing of, like, George plundered these. Like, there's nothing left. So then, yes, Cary Conron. Cary Conron, Ben. Of course, you know. Ben loves Cary Conron.

48:17David Sims:No, he doesn't know. What's your favorite Cary Conron film? What's up? Cary Conron The look of fear. is a man who has directed one and only one film and it is a movie called Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Have you heard of it?

48:29Griffin Newman:No. Gay! I'm shocked. It was a green screen, all green screen movie, Ben. It was like the future. People were like, you don't need sets anymore. Right. A couple movie stars, a bunch of crazy visual effects.

48:40David Sims:He got like Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie for a week. He shot it in like a warehouse in Texas. It's like a steampunk art deco like 30s sort of side five. Is it the ghost of Laurence Olivier who also shows up? It's a movie I have a tremendous fondness for. It is unbelievably boring but weirdly compelling. I find it so boring. It's so boring. It is so boring. I've been using it recently. I said this to you in a text. I've been using it to help myself fall asleep and it's really effective on that front.

49:10Griffin Newman:Yeah, no, I mean, it's used by hospitals around the world for that. But it, like, looks gorgeous. 10 CCs of Sky Captain.

49:17David Sims:It's basically like, what if you made a 1940s movie with CGI? It's trying to be sort of, like, melodramatic, and it's like an old-school version of the future. But it is deathly boring. But when it was an independently produced short film, one producer's like, fuck, this is the future. He bankrolls, I think it was John Avnett, bankrolls it. Sure. They then sell it to Paramount later off of like test footage. But he'd already gotten the actors because part of the pitch was like, I only need a couple million dollars up front to get the actors for a week to do the green screen stage. We'll do some of the animation.

49:53David Sims:We'll show it to people. They'll give us the money to finish it. Paramount is like, this is the future of movies. You can just do it in an afternoon. Digital backlog. And it bombs. You just have to sit in this chair with like an old timey hat on your head. Yeah. That's your whole part. Your performance definitely won't seem disengaged. Yes. But it is a movie that bombs really hard. And this guy, before its release, is announced as he's going to direct John Carter, which makes perfect sense. They're like, here's another kind of like retro futuristic thing. And he figured out this way to make it cheaper.

50:25David Sims:And a lot of it is like him and his buddies and his brother who know how to do the effects themselves. And he's on the movie for a while. And then when he falls off at this film, he's like never discussed again.

50:36Griffin Newman:No, that's the end of him. I mean, he's still around, I assume. Yeah, what happened to him? It goes to Jon Favreau after that, who brings in Mark Fergus, who wrote Children of Mem.

50:45David Sims:Favreau changes the whole... Favreau makes a ton of sense for it. Favreau is similar to Rodriguez, like, I'm ready to make my big tentpole epic. I want to make my serious kind of blockbuster adventure film. And he supposedly loves it, like Stanton. He likes the books. He's obsessed with the books. I wanted to do it forever. And he's starting to swing back to, like, guys, we're not doing fucking virtual backlot shit. We're building sets. We're using puppets. He wants practical makeup.

51:09Griffin Newman:He wants, yeah, like to. He's a director aspiration to eventually do the epic, right? That's the thing. Yeah. And then you want to make your Cubano.

51:20David Sims:No, but all these guys are like, I want to make my Star Wars. The way I felt seeing Star Wars as a child and my world exploded. Can I make my version of that for the next generation? Can I complete the circle? And it makes a lot of sense that for many of these guys, they're like, can I do that also with the book that made me feel that way when I read it?

51:40Griffin Newman:But this has also got the sword and sandal thing. It does have a lot of that. It's old school. It does. It does indeed. His script combines the first three books,

51:49David Sims:Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, The Warlords of Mars. Which those were going to be Stanton's three movies in his trilogy. Sounds great. Which he was definitely going to make, too. He talks a lot about that.

52:00Griffin Newman:Development slows. Jon Favreau decides to make Iron Man. Okay, good luck with that. A man made of iron?

52:07David Sims:He's just like, this is stalled out.

52:09Griffin Newman:Yeah, right. How high does he even jump? How does he jump?

52:11David Sims:But truly, like, Paramount is just, like, dragging their feet on giving him a green light. And he's like, I want to make something. And, like, the Iron Man, like, sort of beacon lights up the sky. And he goes off and does that. And it's the most successful version of what he wanted to do. Right.

52:28Griffin Newman:Yeah. And he levels up big time. Andrew Stanton, as we've mentioned on this podcast, a very serious father. who's basically a rocket scientist, defense department, radar guy. He was into old, hard sci-fi stuff and gave his son John Carter novels, among other things. Stanton grew up loving these books. In high school, he said his friends would call them his romance novels. He was always reading his John Carter books. He was supposedly a fan of the Marvel comic. That was how he first discovered it. The 70s John Carter Warlord of Mars comic from Marvel that came out for a couple of years and is like all set in the space of the first book.

53:09It's sort of like the continuing adventures of John Carter.

53:13David Sims:Marv Wolfman and Gil Kane. It's a good looking book. I had never read it myself. It's kind of before my time and hasn't been reprinted really. But I tracked down some and read a little bit before we did this. And it's fun. I can see the appeal. And then he He kind of, yeah, then he discovered the books and became, I know he was into the books. And then, and I guess this is 1977 and it's right around when Star Wars comes out. That's true. So he's discovering the book before Star Wars. He probably saw that movie and thought it was good. He's, yes. He probably liked it.

53:45Griffin Newman:I like this, he thinks, watching Star Wars at the age of 12. But just when you're talking about filmmakers seeing this and going, I want to make my Star Wars and it's going to be this. For him, they're like inextricably linked from the beginning in his mind.

53:58David Sims:He has both awakenings maybe within the same year. Yes, it's literally a stretch of like six months or something. It's like the way your fetishes develop. You know, it's like these things just imprinted on him simultaneously.

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55:34Griffin Newman:While he's making WALL-E, he's like, which you spend five fucking years making an animated movie or whatever. He's like, I don't have an idea for another animated movie. I feel a little stuck. But he does kind of know that John Carter is floating around there. Paramount's basically, yeah, about to let the rights lapse. Yes. Favreau departs. Yeah. And Stanton sort of swoops in and pitches them like, look, I got nothing to lose here. I don't need another paycheck right now. You know what I mean? Like, he's like, he's got the kind of the swagger of like, I think also like it's about to fall into the public domain at this point.

56:10Griffin Newman:Maybe like we're getting to, you know, it's, it's, it's close.

56:13David Sims:It's like, if you don't start making one now, then anyone could make one. But it also means like, this is the last moment where you have to pay a bunch of money to make one before it doesn't cost anything. I think his point is sort of like, if this goes into the public domain, Asylum is going to make a$2 million version of this tomorrow. They will flood the zone, right?

56:33Griffin Newman:They did do that.

56:33David Sims:But he's making this pitch to Disney where he goes to like the higher-ups of Disney and basically says, there's a jump ball here to take the final crack at doing the definitive origin of American sci-fi correctly.

56:47Griffin Newman:Yeah, he's saying to them like this is to be serious. Well, he says you should get it and I'm so serious I would even do it. Right. And he's already kind of, I guess he hasn't, like WALL-E hasn't come out at this point. But Finding Nemo. But Finding Nemo is a huge.

57:02David Sims:The highest grossing film Disney had ever released. Right. So that's an appealing. He holds a lot of weight. And, you know, even if they don't know that WALL-E is going to work, WALL-E is good.

57:12Griffin Newman:Indeed, they are interested. They want him happy, as he says. One might even say he has a bit of a blank track. I would say so. A little bit in my mind. I would say so. Zemeckis of course as we said had said like I think George Lucas kind of picked this clean things like Conan the Barbarian are cited as you know being influenced by it this film mentioned it already Avatar Avatar Stanton does not agree he says no one's copied it it's just inspired things like it's you know there's plenty of meat

57:42David Sims:on the bone

57:43Griffin Newman:he's a little right

57:45David Sims:in that the exact mix of the elements has not been brought to screen. Like you bringing up the swords and sandals thing.

57:52Griffin Newman:Yeah.

57:52David Sims:That's the trickiest part of the equation, but if you can pull off that juxtaposition, rather than pick the elements clean and like separate them. And you haven't seen a lot of guys jumping like this. Yeah, but you know what though?

58:05Griffin Newman:I really kept thinking about Attack of the Clones. Which has obviously the Jedi's do be jumping like fleas. Genosis. The genosis stuff, the sort of like the fighting pits, the weird creatures. You know, like it does kind of feel like we've seen this before now that doesn't mean this movie can't

58:23David Sims:be a hit but attack of the clones is fully 10 years before i mean this is this is why i fucking stick up for attack of the clones is so strange as like his swords and sandals epic also his noir homage like he just takes three different genres he likes and is like what if i can fucking like backstop them into star wars in a middle chapter they don't hang together that's otherwise I'm like John Carter. It's like a closet where you open someone's closet up and you're like, what is your sense of fashion?

58:52Griffin Newman:Why do you have Hawaiian shirts and tuxedos? This is weird. But I mean, look, Attack of the Clones obviously just has like the most hard-boiled, incredible narrative and like the kind of characters like Dexter Jetson that you can't forget. I have a receipt.

59:04David Sims:Who bought these clones? I have a laundry ticket. We already recently were talking about this.

59:11Griffin Newman:I do just love to litigate it all the time of like, if I just showed up to a planet in a brown robe, they would be like, the clones are ready for you. No further questions. We've been waiting. You don't need to prove who you are. You do not need to even seem to know what we're talking about. They're not going to fit on your ship. The whole time only one's like, huh? And they're like, yes, the clones, remember? Anyway. You're going to need a bigger ship to take them out of here. You are going to need some large ships.

59:37David Sims:But Attack of the Clones, even 10 years old by the time this movie comes out.

59:42Griffin Newman:So Stanton writes the script with Mark Andrews, who has worked on other Pixar stuff, Incredibles, Ratatouille.

59:47David Sims:He ends up directing Brave after Brenda Chapman is fired. Brave comes out this same year.

59:53Griffin Newman:Then Michael Chabon, who has the other credit on this, comes in. And I feel like Chabon had done a lot of work on Spider-Man 2, of course. And he's another guy who supposedly, yes, and loved another huge John Carter fan, supposedly.

1:00:07David Sims:Most of his Spider-Man 2 work was thrown out. by all accounts they made a big splashy announcement because Cavalier and Clay was so big and he was comics related that's the thing like Hollywood loves when they're like oh my god there's a genius who likes quote unquote low art and appreciates it what low art do we have that we can give to him can we hire a highfalutin man to make our big blockbuster so they make this big announcement that he's doing Spider-Man 2 throw out almost all of his work and then bring in Alvin Sargent to basically do with the movie pretty much write it his version was about like Doc Ock hucking Spider-Man.

1:00:40David Sims:Doc Ock was like young and sexy. Keep talking.

1:00:43Griffin Newman:I'm interested. I mean, Shabun is, especially because he then went to Star Trek and people hate what he did at Star Trek too much. Yes, I do think he often is like, I have a really different big brained idea and it will bump against people being like, we were kind of looking for like, you know, the USS Enterprise to go to a planet and maybe have an adventure. Five year mission. He's like, you're not interested in all this stuff I'm thinking about? But Spider-Man is two.

1:01:04David Sims:Two is huge. Arguably the greatest comic book movie of all time. And his name is there in a big credit.

1:01:11Griffin Newman:He had also written a spec screenplay called The Martian Agent that was essentially a hodgepodge of John Carter stories, which he loved, as we say. He also was working on a show with Darren Aronofsky called Hobgoblin that was a World War II show about magic. That sounds kind of cool. For HBO? Yeah. That does sound kind of cool.

1:01:32David Sims:Hey, Ben, would you mind slinging me another web? Gross.

1:01:35Griffin Newman:Wow. Wow All this talk about Spider-Man 2 Made you, you got a little parched

1:01:41David Sims:Thinking about Doc Ock cucking Spidey

1:01:43Griffin Newman:Makes me want to have another cup So like Stanton, Andrews, Shabin All love John Carter You know what I mean? They're all working together With love for the books

1:01:52David Sims:And they're all, it sort of feels like Three little boys in a clubhouse being like Can we relocate what we loved about this? Will that be infectious?

1:02:00Griffin Newman:Who did have benefited maybe from someone coming in who's like I love sci-fi adventure movies I don't love John Carter or know about it, so maybe I can help you put it on. No, polite decline on the coffee. I have non-Spider-Man coffee that I didn't actually recommend.

1:02:14David Sims:The 2009 Star Trek, that was kind of the whole strategy.

1:02:18Griffin Newman:Right. Abrams delivered a movie for you that basically will make Star Trek fans happy, although not all of them. They're never happy. But that kind of swerved away from the notions of Star Trek.

1:02:29David Sims:But between Kurtzman, Orsi, and Abrams, you have three different levels of Star Trek fandom.

1:02:33Griffin Newman:Super nerd, casual nerd. I don't know what Star Trek is. Can we have the bona fides

1:02:37David Sims:and also make it feel approachable? Abrams is like, you had me at Star,

1:02:41Griffin Newman:lost me at Trek. Yeah. Let's just go back to Star Trek. For now, I'll take Trek

1:02:46David Sims:until something better

1:02:47Griffin Newman:comes along after Star Trek. The front runner for the role of John Carter was an actor named Taylor Kitsch. Mm-hmm. Who gets the role.

1:02:54David Sims:Now, we have fought on this a little bit.

1:02:56Griffin Newman:Let's fight.

1:02:57David Sims:Where I feel like you bring up Taylor Kitsch as the ultimate gabbo where the industry was like, this guy, we're telling you it's this guy and you argue to me this movie has two Gabbo's although Kitsch

1:03:07Griffin Newman:is obviously a huge one who's Gabbo? well Gabbo is from The Simpsons remember oh yeah Cressy gets canceled but you know just kind of that Taylor Kitsch the big star they do this all the time Hollywood they put billboards that just say the word Gabbo Taylor Kitsch they're insistent he is the man we love him so industry plant kind of whatever Colin Farrell suffered from this yes it's more like a guy has a little juice and they're like...

1:03:33David Sims:The industry is so preoccupied on convincing you that they're already a thing.

1:03:38Griffin Newman:Why are you... So what's your... And they think...

1:03:40David Sims:Well, I feel like you have argued he is the ultimate. There was nothing there and they sort of just like picked him and pushed him around. No, I have definitely not argued that

1:03:47Griffin Newman:because I love Friday Night Lights. Right. So there's no way I've argued that. That's the thing.

1:03:51David Sims:Because I feel like the 2010s have a lot of gabos, right?

1:03:54Griffin Newman:The one who I truly think of as the ultimate is Travis Fimmel.

1:03:59David Sims:Yes. Yes. This is, I feel like, The argument we've had in the past, when he shows up in Warcraft, I'm like, I keep reading that fucking all these people can't justify a hundred million dollar budget. And this guy's the lead? He's on the A &E Viking show? You just got a guy who also has worn armor? It was on the history channel. I'm sorry. Take it back. But Taylor Kitsch has the sort of like buzzy, supporting, swoony, James Dean-esque bad boy role.

1:04:26Griffin Newman:He was good on that show.

1:04:27David Sims:Friday Night Lights. My brother and my mother are obsessed with that show. Travis Femmel was just one of those guys where you're like, you're telling me he wasn't on Suns of Anarchy?

1:04:34Griffin Newman:They're like, no, Vikings. You're like, but come on, he's got a big old beard. He's got a bald head.

1:04:40David Sims:I think the whole pitch on Travis Femmel was he feels like a biker, but we can put him in armor with a sword.

1:04:48Griffin Newman:He'll bring the biker to the Viking. Tim Riggins, Taylor Kitch is Tim Riggins. So the Friday Night Lights runs 06 to 11. And obviously it was never a hit show. It was always struggling for life. It was always critically acclaimed. Yeah. He was always the sexiest of the boys on it.

1:05:05David Sims:And he's got the part that feels like the best show reel to be a Hollywood leading man. Torture, daddy issues. Remember my brother. He's Dylan from 90210. The homie all needed this. My brother and my mom watching this show every week would just be like, God, this guy is such a movie star. Like, when is someone gonna, you know, crack it?

1:05:23Griffin Newman:And I feel like I first saw him in a movie in X-Men Origins Wolverine. I know he's in like the Covenant and what's it called? The Snakes on a Plane.

1:05:35David Sims:But that was the real. But like those are little roles. Where Hollywood was like, we've taken notice. He's going to have a small part in this. But it's a coveted role. A coveted role that could be bigger for him. It's like the Apatow thing you were talking about. We're going to give him a little part here. Ten hot minutes. And you're going to fall in love with him. And then we're going to give him his own thing.

1:05:52Griffin Newman:Do we think he's good in X-Men Argent Silverine? A terrible movie. Being okay? He's all right. He's maybe one of the acceptable parts of an ungodly bad movie. Maybe the least offensive parts of that movie.

1:06:07David Sims:I mean, the movie does the same thing with him and Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds, at opposite parts of the film. Right. Deadpool leads it off. He is in the middle. Where it's like, we've picked a star that we think is about to pop. Right. We're calling dibs on a character. we're placing the intent on the board and we're testing out how much you like this. And the rejection of both is so huge that it like sets back Deadpool and Ryan Reynolds has to spend the next five years of his life pushing it back uphill.

1:06:34Griffin Newman:But then someone leaked that footage. I wonder who it was. A mystery that shall never be solved. I remember like the Comic-Con footage of him as Gambit where he's got the staff and he goes like, you know, he like jumps and people go like, whoa! We've done it. And then you saw the movie and they were like, oh, by the way, that's the only thing he does in the movie. Sorry. He throws some cards.

1:06:56David Sims:90 % of his screen time is seated behind a poker table and then he gets up at the end, twirls the staff once, throws some cards, goodbye Gambit. That's all I remember. Right. Remy LeBeau. But you were like, okay. He holds the screen. He's not bad.

1:07:11Griffin Newman:He gave good Gambit. He gave good Gambit. The movie sucks, but obviously no one's holding it against him.

1:07:16David Sims:And Hollywood goes like, that's all we need to see. Off to the races. and he books three giant movies, basically back to back to back, all of which come out in 2012 then.

1:07:26Griffin Newman:Which was maybe, if I'm his agent, I'm sweating a little bit about that. In the span of four months,

1:07:31David Sims:in chronological order, John Carter in March, Battleship in May. Which, of course, we've covered on our Patreon. And then Oliver Stone's Savages in July. Was that July? Let's see. Yeah. So when he's doing press for John Carter, they're like, you're the guy. He's the lead of all three movies. He's the guy in all three movies. And all the press is like, well, you're here promoting John Carter, but really, this is about the year of kitsch. By the end of this year, everyone will agree. It's getting kitschy. You're the biggest movie star alive. Things are getting kitschy.

1:08:04Griffin Newman:He has made five films total since then. Right. Like, obviously, he's done TV and he's done some other stuff, you know, but, like, he has been in five movies since then. American Assassin. That's one. a movie you've watched many times been once okay and I just was struck by how he's this sort of secondary it was yeah it's Keaton's the I haven't seen Keaton's the mentor

1:08:28David Sims:Dylan O 'Brien's the hero Kitch is the former assassin who went bad is that right I think so okay I haven't seen it but wait I'm struggling to even name the other four there's one you won't know the four of them are real movies four of them are real movies but he's not the lead in any of them he's supporting parts and all yes I feel like there was one thing I remember seeing him in where I was like, oh, he's pretty good.

1:08:48Griffin Newman:There's a movie, a Canadian movie by Don McKellar called The Grand Seduction with him and Brendan Gleeson. Have not seen, though. Never heard of it. Don't know anything about it. There's a big war movie that he's like the secondary lead in that was a huge hit.

1:09:00David Sims:Oh, Lone Survive. Right. Which that movie feels like it was Peter Berg doing a like, can I save Emile Hirsch? Can I save Taylor Kitsch? Like, bring these guys back.

1:09:10Griffin Newman:there's an extremely good movie that he's quite good in although he's not a lead he's part of the ensemble that was a giant bomb from a great director that was a disaster movie real true story movie oh only the brave right where he's again like lone survivor one of the guys yeah but he's good in it

1:09:28David Sims:yeah but it was a giant bomb

1:09:29Griffin Newman:it was a giant bomb and then there is a somewhat forgotten cop drama that was pretty good

1:09:36David Sims:uh is it's not the Chadwick Boseman one it sure is 16 bridges? Keep going. You need more bridges. 24? Down? 21 bridges? There he is.

1:09:46Griffin Newman:Where I think I have seen it. I think he might be the villain? I can't remember. But like, you know, he's just like, hey, I'm officer. Good guy. I'm following up on the case. I have a few questions. I'll see you later. And you're like, watch out for that guy. He is allergic to the idea

1:10:01David Sims:of being the center again. Understandably. He doesn't want that weight on him. And all of them are variations on the former golden boy. In his defense,

1:10:09Griffin Newman:Obviously, he did do True Detective Season 2, which I know was like another kind of weird blank check bounce. But like, you know, he wasn't. He was in the Unabomber show. He was David Koresh in the Waco show. Right, right. That's what it was. He's been in a bunch of other stuff. He's in that Chris Pratt show, The Terminal List, that everyone's always talking about.

1:10:28David Sims:But you get the sense, understandably, that the experience of 2012 kind of shook him to his core. Wow. And he takes tentative steps now. Totally.

1:10:36Griffin Newman:I just found out that he is the lead character in a Terminal List spinoff called Dark Wolf Dark Wolf Terminal List is really doing so well that we need a spinoff? like are we sure? people want to see the Dark Wolf how do you think he is in this movie? I mean to be clear again like Stanton loved him in Friday Night Lights thought he kind of because he has the hair in Friday Night Lights thought he kind of matched the sort of classic kind of paintings of John Carter and the old paperbacks and stuff. Yeah. And just was kind of like, this is my guy, even though I think there was some discussion of like, you sure we don't want to like call Tom Cruise?

1:11:17David Sims:There's all this weird reporting of Tom Cruise being interested in the film. It is confirmed that Stanton met with Tom Cruise a few times. The rap article says that Cruise campaigned for the job.

1:11:28Griffin Newman:Right. And Stanton says he met with him. I have, that feels impossible to me in terms of like, if Cruise had gone to you know Disney and said like I would like to play John Carter I imagine Disney would have said yes maybe not it's kind of a weird period it was a weird period

1:11:42David Sims:for Cruise where it's like yes it would help to have a name above your title but also he costs so much he's expensive and he's already going to take over like a big portion of your profits and like this is

1:11:53Griffin Newman:pre-ghost protocol which kind of like reset the Cruise narrative so it's kind of the weird Cruise the most successful version

1:11:58David Sims:of Pixar director goes to live action that is true Which comes out the year before this. Like, it's also weird that you're like, the things that you feel would have encouraged Disney to greenlight this hadn't actually happened yet. Avatar hasn't come out. Ghost Protocol hasn't come out. You're like, the math retroactively, you're like, it must have been, they looked at those two things and said, sure. I think the other thing is Stanton's like,

1:12:22Griffin Newman:we wanted a young actor because the idea is we're making a series. Yes. We need somebody who can make three of these over the next 10 years.

1:12:29David Sims:I also feel like the implication has always been that Cruise kind of came to him late, that either Kitsch had already been cast or he had his eye on Kitsch. He had certainly done all the screen testing because there was like Josh Duhamel and Shane Tatum, all the people you'd assume were in that pot. And then Cruise kind of like swept in and was like, what about me? And because he was so focused on the trilogy thing, he's like, am I going to have to make like a third movie with a 60-year-old Cruise? Certainly a 60-year-old Cruise. He's surely not going to be making action movies at that point.

1:13:02Griffin Newman:His body will decompose. Lynn Collins also says, like, everyone I tested against was like a kitsch-aged actor. Right. Like, if Cruise was involved, it was not what people were. Yeah, I read something where Stanton was talking about, like, at first I was like, he's too young. But then I looked back at, you know, the ages of Harrison Ford when he made Star Wars and people like that. And they were always younger than you think they were. Right. And so he felt like he could carry it off. He had the gravitas or whatever. but uh okay can we having having said that can we talk about the performance for a little bit i

1:13:32David Sims:know we got more context to get into but you asked i think it's a good question like yes is taylor

1:13:37Griffin Newman:kitsch good as john carter in the film john carter which was a disney release in 2012 directed by

1:13:41David Sims:i i think it like his performance half works i think it works in spurts like the movie itself right and i think it's a weird case where you're like historically at this time a man of his age would have experienced a lot of life and could be kind of hardened and broken down by said experiences. But to see him in a 2012 movie, you're like, this guy's too young. I don't buy this guy having the kind of war wounds and emotional damage.

1:14:12Griffin Newman:It doesn't jibe with his backstory. You're right.

1:14:14David Sims:I think he's kind of good at the charming swashbuckling thing. I think he has moments where he does the Indiana Jones thing well. I think anytime the movie wants him to sell The Haunted and the sort of weary, he can't quite sell it. And I do think he's fundamentally too modern. I think he, I mean, I was another person. Loved Friday Night Lights. Loved that show. My wife and I watched every episode. And he was good on that show. He was very good. But I think what he was doing on that show was like almost, and I don't mean this like insultingly, it was almost nothing. It was a lot of just like presence.

1:14:48He didn't have to, he was just standing there looking incredible and being handsome.

1:14:53Griffin Newman:He had emotional moments, but like the emotions of that show are carried more by like, obviously, Zach Gilford, you know, like by other actors. Yeah. And I just think he was good in stillness, let's say. And in this movie, I don't know, it just feels like he's trying so hard. I feel him trying, whereas like Friggins is so laconic. Yeah. Yeah. And this character, and I don't know about anybody else in this room, but every time he speaks, there's something very affected about his voice. And the voice that he's using, you know, it's almost like he's trying to do John Wayne or something.

1:15:33David Sims:I was going to say, it's got a bit of Tug Speedman where it feels like the way you parody an action star rather than an actual effortless action star. You know, like there's that one of the scenes that like half works very well in this movie is his first encounter with Tars Tarkus. You have Willem Dafoe, who's very good and very funny locked in. He is locked in. I mean, like he's done it many times. He can just he's just good at the alien voice and Tars Tarkus. Aquaman, he's good at this role. Right. Like how many times has he done this? For your knowledge, Ben, this is Dafoe on set. on stilts on stilts with a mocap rig over his head.

1:16:14David Sims:And sometimes Dafoe who loves challenges and technical exercises and whatever is like walking in stilts in the desert. He's not just walking. In some scenes he's like running and they have guys I found like footage behind the scenes of him. He has a guy literally dressed from head to toe covered completely in green whose job it is is to just make sure he doesn't topple over as he's running full speed as extras. brandishing a sword. But in this scene, he's doing the, you know, like, Tars, Tarkis, suck! And he's great. And Virginia! You're Virginia! Hilarious. And then they cut to the other side and it's Taylor Kitsch going,

1:16:54Griffin Newman:you know, like, Captain John Carter. Virginia. He doesn't quite bump on me as hard as he seems to be bugging on you. I don't know. I don't love it. I am do-tar, so-jax.

1:17:08David Sims:You saying the presence and the stillness thing. What's tricky about these types of movies and why it's always really tough to be like, well, we need a young lead because we want to build a franchise. But that also means we're placing someone into this type of film who has limited experience. Yes. Even if you've worked a lot, it's like, how often have you been the lead? How big has the project you're in the lead been? And now you're on like a shoot where you might for two or three consecutive weeks have one line of dialogue. Something like shooting the white ape sequence is like so many tiny little pieces where I do think you kind of want to cast for presence.

1:17:48David Sims:Ideally, you want Harrison Ford. You want someone who's equally good at selling the dialogue scenes and the character and the comedy. But also, if you're getting into technical action pieces, every one of those is going to have an energy and a presence and not just be a guy hitting choreography. But there is an additional problem here with him, which actually is not his fault. It is the conception of the character, which is that they cast this incredibly handsome, striking man to play a shockingly frequent like focus of ridicule, especially in the beginning of this movie. They, you know, the Tug Speedman thing is kind of funny because they almost do cast him as like this bumbling comic, like loon.

1:18:28This boon. A lot of the movie. So much, especially at the beginning of the movie, is making fun of him. They literally, they like put him, they treat him like a baby. Like they discover the Martian babies. They do treat him like baby. He is baby. Bouncing baby. They put him in a diaper. They do. They put him in a diaper. They throw blue goo on him or something. They baby powder him. They stick him in a vat of alien. Is it cum? I don't know what it is. Who knows? It might be.

1:18:52David Sims:I feel like you were burning to say something, Sims.

1:18:55Griffin Newman:Oh, I'm not sure. Oh, well, Sam Worthington. Again, I can't help it, but I do think it's vital when we're talking about Taylor Kitsch because Sam Worthington's the same play, even a less known guy. Yeah. You kind of just need to be. Hold the center. A little regular. Hold the center. Be relatable. Yeah. Have a little personality. You will be blue often. unlike Taylor Kitsch although Taylor Kitsch briefly is blue in this movie when he comes out of the white ape right and I do think Sam Worthington is better why is that I don't think Sam Worthington is incredible in Avatar or anything but is it just that he has a little bit more good humor and that kind of vibe they don't make him dress and act like a baby well sure I mean he does wear a little there's so much it's just you've cast this guy who's so cool and I don't think of as a comedic actor And then like as soon as he's on Mars, it's all shtick.

1:19:49Actually, before Mars, his introduction with Cranston is like him jumping out of windows, peeing on the ground.

1:19:57David Sims:It's all shtick. See, this is your mileage may vary thing. But I felt this at the time and rewatching it was pleasantly surprised. I think he sells the comedy better than I would imagine. I wouldn't say he's funny in this. But I also think if we're looking at Worthington, Hunnam, Headland, Wright, the guys in this are... So, right.

1:20:19Griffin Newman:Hunnam is, I mean, like Pacific Rim, I guess. Yes, and King Arthur later. Right. Headland is, you know, Tron Legacy. Which I like that performance in that movie, but a lot of people didn't really.

1:20:29David Sims:And is it similar kind of swaggery? Like, is there a little bit of Marlon Brando wild one? Is there a little bit of cheeky humor in this? That's what they're trying to get. A modern, they don't want a guy playing stoic sci-fi hero. I think what works for Worthington is that Cameron kind of set him up to succeed in the inverse of how Stanton a little bit set Kitch up to fail. In Avatar, he's like, kind of the point is that you're the boring guy. Kind of the point is that you're just like a personality list marine. And then we'll build the humanity in later. there's a we didn't talk about this in a dead poet society but then i saw someone on the reddit call it out that hawk did this interview where he said we're was really smart about casting for the

1:21:14Griffin Newman:final color and what he meant by that was yes yes we can't believe we didn't bring this i know but

1:21:19David Sims:that like in dead poet society you're like weird you're having hawk play like the timid guy not robert sean leonard's part where he's like the artsy ambitious you know passionate guy and he said, you want to cast for the final color, Robert Sean Leonard will ultimately get you to the suicide scene where you need to. That's his wheelhouse. And it will feel explosive when that part of him comes out. Likewise, when Hawk gets on the desk and finally is passionate, overly earnest Ethan Hawke, that will be explosive. Right. And I think there was a little bit of Cameron casting for the final color, which is just like, have Jake Sully be a little bit of a blank.

1:21:56David Sims:and then what Worthington is good at is kind of the earthy, earnest, I care romance thing, which is like casting him off of fucking somersault and shit, right? Yeah, he is good at that. But you're also really not asking him to be funny. You're making him the joke, but in a kind of lower level way and you're letting all the other characters pop around him. Yes. The secret to that movie is Natiri is really driving everything. And we're good. And they cast that for people. We will talk about the rest of the ensemble

1:22:20Griffin Newman:in a second and all that. That does matter a lot.

1:22:23David Sims:I think what Stan really wants is the Indiana Jones thing. And you saying that the movie is constantly embarrassing him. It's the thing that at this point in time, I think Hollywood filmmakers are pointing at a lot. We're getting a lot of blank, generic kind of stoic heroes. And what people are forgetting is that Han Solo and Indiana Jones fucked up a lot. They were funny. They weren't just cool all the time. And a lot of it was watching them finesse a situation and feeling the struggle of, are they going to be able to pull this off?

1:22:55Griffin Newman:Yeah, well, Ford's really good at the I'm one plan ahead at best kind of like on the fly kind of chaos. And then you watch him trip

1:23:03David Sims:and then you watch him recover. Right. And this is a movie that builds in those moments of mid-battle John Carter being like, you know, the moment that I felt like was really big in the trailer of the white ape, the second and third white apes coming out and cutting to him sighing of like, oh, this is a guy who has vulnerability. He's stressed out that he's in this movie. and it's I don't butt up against that as much as as much as just how goofy some of the things they I mean he's literally

1:23:29Griffin Newman:like I think you're also a diaper you're describing a problem that the movie has in general of it can't quite reconcile the goofiness and the epicness that well and the tragic weight Kitsch also doesn't like work at the end of the movie when he's like my master plan is being revealed and I am still just like you just kind of feel 29 years old to me I do love the ending

1:23:50David Sims:and the ending

1:23:50Griffin Newman:I don't mind the concept of the ending. Yeah. I just don't think he is. I think he kind of sells it.

1:23:56David Sims:I'm a little hotter in this performance than you, even though it doesn't totally work. Yeah. Again, to me, it's like it's an interesting way to conceive the character because it's not from the books, you know, as much as Stanton loves the books. The books are not about this guy having these wacky adventures. This is grand, epic romance. No real personality. Very serious. And the books are very serious. Yes. And, you know, like grand. And here we have all this shtick. And it almost feels like, and I don't know this, but it's just like, well, we're making a movie based on this thing from the 19-teens.

1:24:30Maybe we want to give it a little, like, silent comedy flavor. You know, there's almost kind of like a—

1:24:35Griffin Newman:Yeah. When he's bumbling around in the desert— You're right. There's a little Buster Keaton in it. There's a Buster Keaton kind of a thing, for sure. He's in the desert bumbling around trying to stand. Let's also acknowledge he's running straight from this into WALL-E, right?

1:24:49David Sims:Like he gets Disney to buy the rights to this while he's finishing WALL-E. This is what I was going to say. And he's going into production on this a year and a half after WALL-E is released. Like these things are like overlapping. And WALL-E, as we covered last week, he's just mainlining Lloyd Chaplin Keaton. Like they said at Pixar every week they would screen those movies. They'd rewatch them. They were obsessively studying the type of hero. And as he said, what he learned with Wally is the emotional arc isn't the guy. It's the way he changes the world around him. I think you can feel that in this movie.

1:25:23I had a lot of success. People loved Wally. They loved that the way that I kind of imbued that character with that silent comedian energy. And it seems to be here as well. And I just don't think it fits this movie the way it fit that movie, especially with Taylor Kitsch as your guy. A guy that I like. A guy that I was excited to see. in this movie.

1:25:44Griffin Newman:He says he regrets that he didn't do enough personally. He didn't give everything he had. He kind of sounds like an athlete talking after a loss. Kind of like, it's on me. It's not on anyone else. Like, the team is great. The coach is great. But he says he talks to Lynn Collins every day. These relationships were born. He says he had a huge respect for Andrew. I never had a fight with him. Even day 80 in the miserable fucking desert because I respect him so much. This isn't a production where people are like, what a nightmare. Everyone had a good... No, that is true. the cast of this movie or at least was into it

1:26:15David Sims:has continued to defend it. Right. Like you read interviews with Samantha Morton with Defoe with everybody to this day and they're like I had a great time doing that and it felt like the movie got thrown under the bus. Dominic West continues to defend it.

1:26:26Griffin Newman:Dominic West who looks really good in this movie. Yes he does. He's fucking hot. Yes he does. Because now Dominic West is settled into his I play British buffoon because I'm a little older. You know like forget Dominic West was fucking hot. I mean obviously we love McNutty

1:26:39David Sims:but like that's a little different. It is funny when you watch a movie and you can tell what the director was watching at the time. And you're like, this has three Rome cast members. I know, yeah, exactly.

1:26:50Griffin Newman:When James Purifoy showed up, I was like, we don't need to be bringing, I don't mind him as an actor. He cannot come in this late. I'm sorry. You already had Dominic West. You can't be too British guy, like a TV actor.

1:27:00David Sims:But it's so much kind of rise of prestige TV in late 2000s. Totally 100%. You got three Rome people. You got a wire person. You got a True Blood person. You got the Breaking Bad guy. You got a Friday Night Lights guy. For sure. Yeah. It's that era All-Stars.

1:27:16Griffin Newman:And then Tars Tarkas had that sitcom. The guy. Tars! Yeah. It's called Tars! So Willem Dafoe obviously had worked on Finding Nemo. He liked Pixar. He liked their approach. And as he puts it, that guy asked me to play a 12-foot-tall Jeddak of the Green Race of Tharks. What? You're going to say no to that? I don't think so. That's the Willem Dafoe attitude. Because I feel like some other actors would be like, no. I do think no. Stilton Desert? No.

1:27:44David Sims:Willem Dafoe's like, let me at it. When you say likes Pixar, likes the approach, it's the other thing around this movie, which is, man, Pixar has had the best track record of anyone in Hollywood history. And it feels like they just work and work and work until they crack the story. And it always just fits together perfectly. And there's a growing feeling of, why are these kids' movies better than all the quote-unquote serious adult blockbusters that Hollywood's making, should they be making those? How do we, like, infect the Pixar process into the other areas of studio filmmaking? And by the time this comes out, the ghost protocol has come out.

1:28:25Yeah. And that has only increased that sentiment because it's like, wow, Bradford really cracked that one. Maybe let these guys do everything. Yes. I mean, I'm saying a lot of negative things about John Carter, but what I do want to say here, I was excited about this movie when it came out.

1:28:39Griffin Newman:I was so pumped. I was excited. I remember the trailer really getting pushed down our throats and all that. And like starting to get a little tired of that, you know, inevitable blockbuster-y sort of thing where they're just like, you're all excited. And I'm like, I'm going to. Teaser trailer a year in advance. All right. A little bit more. Five months in the desert on stilts. That's quite an achievement according to Willem Dafoe. Mostly the four corners. Dominic West thought it was a brilliant film. Thinks Andrew Stanton is a fucking genius. works with him again on Finding Dory right he thinks Hollywood politics put it in the bin like he's just right some of these actors are just like I don't know I loved that like no further questions there is I don't Cranston also basically was like it was great fuck box office fuck Hollywood tracking like these jerks I don't think this film

1:29:28David Sims:ever was going to be a mega hit but there is no denying that by the time it came out it was doomed there was three months of the most overwhelming press

1:29:38Griffin Newman:Yeah, the kind of trades thing where they smell a bomb and they start to exult and like, did you know how much this costs? And it's called John Carter? What are they thinking? You know, which like then they tried to do with sinners. And then when it blew up in their faces, they were like, okay, but it didn't do that good for like a week. And people screamed at them so much that they were like, all right, you know, maybe forget it. Like, I guess it's okay.

1:30:02David Sims:But there's also Dick Cook, who had had this incredibly triumphant run at Disney, had stepped down. Rich Ross takes over. Rich Ross had been running the Disney Channel, I believe. And I mean, Rick Ross was doing great at that time.

1:30:15Griffin Newman:Yeah, right.

1:30:15David Sims:You know, Teflon Don over there. But then he has a really shaky run. Like, he inherits several films that end up being really successful, like the first Alice in Wonderland and things like that. But the things that he greenlights basically all start to crash and burn. And he's out pretty shortly after this. They hire a woman named M.T. Carney, who ran a boutique marketing agency, to be put in charge of all marketing for Disney films. And it was a sort of shockwave announcement of, like, is Disney trying to, like, do something different? This is someone who does not have the experience and has not ever worked at this scale.

1:30:55David Sims:She's never worked in movie marketing, period. And this ended up being the main film she worked on. and then I believe she got fired either a month before or a month after it came out. Like, this movie is overseen by a bunch of transitional people in the Disney regime. I just remember a lot of talk about the title. Yeah. And John Carter of Mars or just John Carter and who is John Carter and there was all these articles about that. There's all this second guessing. There's all this revolving door shit. Disney at this point in time is in a struggle which is part of why they fucking just buy Marvel and Lucasfilm and go like, that's our live action thing solved.

1:31:31David Sims:But this movie becomes the center to focus on of what the fuck is going on at Disney and how much money have they spent on this thing that we've never heard of. Ben, just to clearly state this, the book is called A Princess of Mars. That title immediately evokes something. But Disney releases the film, The Princess and the Frog, covered on this show, and it does well, but not hugely well. And their takeaway is, no boy will see a movie with princess in the title. They immediately pivot to the in development, in production, Rapunzel movie being retitled Tangled and the Snow Queen movie being retitled Frozen.

1:32:09David Sims:They're like, we need these kind of actiony titles. And they say to Stanton, cannot be called Princess of Mars. Got it. We'll call it John Carter of Mars. That helps us come up with our franchise heading, John Carter's the guy. What happens then? Disney releases a movie called Mars Needs Moms, aforementioned. The final film in their deal with Zemeckis, he produces it, but does not direct. It is his final, like, mocap movie. And it is a gigantic disaster. And the takeaway from that is, fuck, Mars is a problem. And they zoom out. And they look at the data that David mentioned before. They're like, fuck, there were all these Mars movies

1:32:48Griffin Newman:in the last 10 years. And also, like, it sounds like a boy thing, right? Right. Like, it's like, it's funny that they're like, princess is too girly. And then they're like, Mars is too boy. They admit this. Yeah. They're like. Girls won't go to a Mars movie. Yes.

1:33:00David Sims:Both things. So you end up with John Carter. That means nothing. Because they're so terrified of scaring off both sides of the audience that they end up on a thing. Isn't that the guy on ER? Right.

1:33:12Griffin Newman:Like, don't you want to. Yeah. Of course, Dr. John Carter. Empty. But like, yeah. Don't you want to go see a John Carter? Well, what's that about? A guy called John Carter. What does he do? He's on Mars. They certainly do some stuff. Like, it's just like, how are you.

1:33:24David Sims:Anyway. Impossible. But it's like the perfect fucking like Hollywood out thinks themselves into a hole.

1:33:30Griffin Newman:I was watching the end of this movie on the train here and a woman sat down next to me and tapped on my shoulder and was like, what are you watching? And I'm like, John Carter. She's like, what?

1:33:42David Sims:She's probably tapping you on the shoulder and expecting you to say Dune. And she'll go, oh, that's what Dune is. I hear everyone talking about Dune. The idea that she's seeing this like expensive sci-fi movie on your phone and the title is something she hasn't heard of.

1:34:07David?

1:34:08David Sims:Yes? Got any big summer plans? If you're traveling, you got late nights, packed weekends, zero structure, any of those. Keeping AG1 in your routine helps you stay consistent. That's a loaded word right there. Consistent. Yes. When everything else gets, and here's another loaded word, unpredictable.

1:34:27Griffin Newman:Oh, I don't want that. And I know you don't either. Look, it's a daily health drink with a multivitamin. Yep. Pre and probiotics. Yep. Superfoods. Mm-hmm. And antioxidants. It's an all-star lineup. One scoop, eight ounces of water. You just shake it off. There you go. That's it. You drink it.

1:34:43David Sims:It takes 30 seconds. I know you drink it every single day. What's your favorite flavor right now? Right now, I'm actually really big into berry. I've been cycling through them, and I've really been enjoying this berry phase. I will say this as well, David. You said it wherever you are. I'm about to go away for six weeks, and you better believe I just ordered a whole box of travel packs so that I don't have to travel unarmed. I had no doubt.

1:35:08Griffin Newman:So visit drinkag1.com slash check to get your free morning person hat and free AG1 flavor sampler. in your welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription. That's an $82 value. That's drinkag1.com slash check.

1:35:27David Sims:When I wear that hat, it's going to be so ironic. Yes. I don't like the mornings, but I love AG1.

1:35:33Griffin Newman:Yes.

1:35:49David Sims:Dune is another interesting thing to place out here. We're watching this. It's so similar to Dune in so many ways. And it feels like after this run of not just the failed Disney boys adventure movies, but like Valerian, you know, Patrick Willems, our buddy, did a great video on what he called the Gonzo blockbuster. These movies that were sort of like very silly and operatic Jupiter ascending. uh speed racer certainly falls into that and his argument is that like fury road is the only one of those movies that worked at the time there was a sort of like 10-year run of can we let guys just fucking do anything and fury road's the only one that's a hit and is well liked upon release and most of them kind of miss and it feels like dune is the final correction for that which is you need to just ground the shit out of this if you're gonna make these kinds of movies you have to really just like place it in, you know, intimate human emotions and hard details and verisimilitude versus just like, I don't know, there's like a ship that flies.

1:36:53I mean, I guess I have to give this movie some amount of credit that they didn't water it down. I love that most about it. I mean, it's got these crazy green four armed aliens. Not just that. They kept the names.

1:37:09Griffin Newman:Just the kind of like that it's about a bunch of inter-Martian politics. that they, in my opinion, could have maybe done a better job explaining. Could have simplified. But they are definitely trying to get it all across.

1:37:21David Sims:And as much as they make him a comedic figure, this movie is mercifully devoid of, you're called the what? There's no John Carter is, it's more them making fun of John Carter than John Carter being like, Barsoom, okay, now I've heard everything. That is true. That is true. But on the flip side, I will say, John Carter takes a long time to figure out that he is on Mars. Over an hour? 51 minutes. 51. He's already met. Why do you keep saying pursue? He's already met. Why are you green? He's met four armed green skin, 10 foot tall aliens. He has seen alien creatures burst out of eggs. And he's like, where am I?

1:38:02Montana? He's seen flying ships. And he's like, what is? Yeah. He's like, which state am I in? Here we are on Earth. And she's like, no, John Cotta, you are on Bassoon. His wildest thinking is— And he literally says, I'm on Mars?

1:38:16David Sims:His wildest thinking is, this must be that Canada I've heard so much about. Well, like— They're like us, but a little different. Again, they're just treating him as such a dunderhead. Like, I want to just kind of shake him a little bit and be like— Get with the program. Get with the program. We're not—yeah, we're not in Canada. We're not in Montana. clearly this is we gotta be able to keep up with this buddy um

1:38:41Griffin Newman:now the film was made in initially made at Long Cross Studios which is in London which I don't know if you guys have been to London does not resemble Mars no at all interesting Dan Mindell who shot this movie who's like a big I would say like does a lot of these big kind of productions this is basically

1:38:57David Sims:the film he makes in between Star Trek and Star Wars The Force Awakens yeah

1:39:04Griffin Newman:he also shot Star Trek Into Darkness Yes. He shot Amazing Spider-Man 2. He also shot a little film starring the hottest movie star in the world, Taylor Kitsch, Savages. Oh, man.

1:39:14David Sims:This guy got to lens Taylor Kitsch so much.

1:39:18Griffin Newman:He's currently making my most anticipated film of all time, Godzilla X-Kong Supernova. He's basically like, the studio was fucking being cheap. We should have shot the entire thing in the four corners, like, you know, desert-y America. Yeah. we eventually did end up there but it was way too late so much of it was done on stages it doesn't feel textured enough like he he's very anti like that they did England stuff

1:39:44David Sims:it is maybe the best thing this movie has going for it especially now 14 years on is anytime they are in a fucking like John Ford Vista it's remarkable you're like we don't get this anymore you don't get people and CGI creatures in a beautiful organic landscape that isn't the volume. Yes. And it is cool that it starts in Monument Valley and then you're in this alien landscape and wherever they shot it, it just, it feels, it has a realistic texture to it. Going for the Mars version of Monument Valley, I think is a smart strategy. And anytime the movie is deploying that and making it a parallel to the actual, like West we see at the beginning, it is effective.

1:40:29David Sims:But they shot this on film. Yes. There was already the 3D push that they fought up against. Of course, there was one of those last minutes. Right. Post-conversion.

1:40:37Griffin Newman:No concessions or adjustments for 3D. They shot on 35.

1:40:40David Sims:Yeah, Mandel and Stanton were like, it's going to be too hard to figure out how to do this. We don't want to do it incorrectly. Right. I mean, the look of this, I don't, I don't think the look of this movie is a problem. No. Even if what he's saying about the stages, I mean. There are sort of like green screeny bits that you're like, okay.

1:40:55Griffin Newman:Those also. I don't think it looks bad. I think it looks, I mean, there's a lot of really cool props. The green screeny bits. The set design and costumes.

1:41:03David Sims:I think all the production design in this movie is good. The aliens are cool. The Tharks are really cool. The way that they move. How, you know, like Tars, Tarkas gestures with his arms and uses his hands to like, some of his hands are gesture hands and some of them are like, he'll use all of them in different ways. One thought I had watching this again this week was like, I know it's John Carter of Mars, but what if it was about Tars? He's kind of my man. Tars of Mars is a winner. Yeah. You got Willem Dafoe. I mean, Willem Dafoe is maybe just because I just think he's so locked in and he gives such a great performance.

1:41:35I want more TARS.

1:41:36David Sims:I also think it's the single biggest story mistake this movie makes maybe is.

1:41:41Griffin Newman:Is like having him vanish.

1:41:42David Sims:I think the Samantha Morton character does not work at all. And I think I parsed what they were trying to do, but you're watching it and just going like this whole thing should be buddy movie with John and TARS. Lose her, have Dafoe play that role. Totally. That is one of the things that is pretty faithful to the book is that that character, the Sola character, has even more screen time in the book. Yes. And has a backstory. They make much more of the backstory of her with TARS.

1:42:10Griffin Newman:Like the hatchling thing. She has a whole chapter that explains her backstory where she tells John Carter her backstory. It's not like him, like I guess in the movie, John Carter just kind of intuits what's going on with like, she's your dog. A scene I don't write that does not work. And he's like, she's your daughter, right? And he's like, how do you know that? And he's like, intuition. And I'm like, intuition? What the fuck are you talking about? These creatures are born out of eggs. You literally just went through their hatch. Like, how the fuck would you know that?

1:42:39David Sims:Yeah, they all also, not to be racist, kind of look the same.

1:42:42Griffin Newman:Yeah. And Willem Dafoe's like, you have successfully guessed that the one in a million, like, she was kind of raised as my daughter thing is true of her. Yes. In the book, that's all literally explained to John Carter by Sola.

1:42:57David Sims:Lynn Collins talks about this a lot in that 10 years later piece, but that the character was originally a lot flintier and spikier. Her character or the Sola character? Yes. Would make sense.

1:43:08Griffin Newman:Have her be fucking Neytiri.

1:43:10David Sims:Yes. And that there were like, you know, the three rounds of reshoots on this movie, basically. And I think when you're calling out the couple little pieces that feel more apparently green screeny, those are like the brief moments that feel like these were the last reshoots. Because part of what made this cost go up so high is every time they did reshoots versus how they usually do them today where they stick out like sore thumbs, they would just fucking go back and reconstruct the sets or go back to the four corners. Like they were doing like full production cost. We're just redoing this.

1:43:39Griffin Newman:Indeed, of course. Stanton says when we're at Pixar, we basically make a movie four to seven times. And I've never been part of a movie where you don't do that because obviously he never made a live action movie before. The way the stories get this great is you iterate. He wasn't really prepared for how you do that.

1:43:56David Sims:And a thing they said at Pixar all the time that I think Steve Jobs sort of passed on to them was the goal is to be wrong as quickly as possible. It's not to try to get it right immediately. It's just try to identify the wrong moves fast so that you can correct them. Right. Like you make your animatics, you put your own voice on it, you see what works, you see what doesn't. If you can identify what the problem is, then you can actually solve it. It's not about being a genius who has the whole thing figured out from the beginning. We talked about in the WALL-E episode that it's one of the biggest kind of like, and certainly the most successful Pixar, fuck, I got it wrong.

1:44:32David Sims:We have to reanimate mostly finished footage. We're like less than a year before it comes out. He's like, I fucked this up. I had Eve getting damaged and Wally needing to save her for the last act. And they have to scrap and redo almost everything. That's not like a small change that affects everything in the plot. And then he sort of was like, oh, and it needed to be this all along. And the ripple effect, it's part of why Wally was so expensive. It was the most expensive animated film at the time. But he's able to point to that and go, guys, I know that was an expensive choice and people would have said good enough, but didn't the results bear out the decision?

1:45:09Right.

1:45:10David Sims:He's running off of that kind of confidence of... Again, this is a real blank check movie. Yeah. And Wally was a blank check and it cleared. Yes, that is and cleared. With flying colors. So then he's in kind of like a Nolan post-inception state of, I did my risky, expensive thing that you were letting me do just to stay in business with me and that exceeded expectations. I will say one of the ways in which I do think this movie is interesting is as the kind of larger meta allegory of John Carter, the guy from Earth who goes to Mars, Andrew Stanton, the animator, making his first very tentative, very bobbly steps into live action.

1:45:51David Sims:There is something that's interesting in that. I think it's in the New Yorker piece, but he said when they finally greenlit the movie, he was like, I'm going to lose 20 pounds.

1:46:03Griffin Newman:I'm going to run like a mile or two

1:46:05David Sims:every day and when I'm on set I'm never sitting down I'm never going to my trailer I so badly want to fight the notion that I'm like an animation guy who cheated his way into this I'm a nerd at his desk

1:46:19Griffin Newman:and look again everyone speaks highly of him on set and all that now it is maybe a mistake by him to do an incredibly frank profile in the New Yorker before the movie comes out in which he talks about the fact that he showed a 2 hour 50-minute cut of the film to Disney in December of 2011. Okay, so four months before it comes out. The Pixar guys who watch it at this meeting immediately are like, we could plus this, we could plus it, you know, like start doing all of that. And like, but we're confused by the beginning and the lecture about Barsoom. It doesn't feel really personal. And the Pixar process obviously would be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was our first go.

1:46:58Griffin Newman:And well, now let's get to work on fixing it.

1:47:00David Sims:Thank God we showed it to you in the story reels stage rather than finished production.

1:47:05Griffin Newman:And then obviously at this point, there's only so much that can be done. They do do many reshoots. Lynn Collins felt like, as you said, like in the original script, she slaps John Carter a few times. That was her audiciency. She's a warrior. Yeah. And Disney basically was like, this character comes off too hard, too bitchy, like may soften her. at a certain point she says during the reshoot she was just like to Andrew like just tell me

1:47:31David Sims:where to stand and what to do I've lost the character like whatever it is you need from me I'll do it there's like 20 minutes of deleted scenes on the blu-ray and it's frustrating because you're like I know there's an hour and 20 minutes there's a John Carter the missing pieces yeah and I want to see all of it and I'm sure a lot of the deleted footage is like alternate versions in like a choose your own adventure book way of what could have been in the movie but there's an alternate opening that starts with her that lynn collins is doing the opening narration beginnings are difficult times or whatever yes and uh then it cuts to her sort of like meeting with all the leaders trying to sort of you know and her piece and then there were several deleted scenes that sort of were focused on her and the samantha morton character where beyond it just being well that's from the books it felt like they were trying to make a sort of parallel story of the two of them you know not trying to be defined by their fathers and trying to be leaders.

1:48:25David Sims:And when you nerf her character down, the Samantha Morton character just feels like she is there. And the whole time, you're, to invoke another Simpsons thing, asking, where is Tars Tarkas? Where is Tars Tarkas? But also, I think when, yeah,

1:48:38Griffin Newman:what's her, what's the character? Lynn Collins. Lynn Collins, but what's the character? Deja Thoris. Deja Thoris. Deja, of course. She also is mostly just there and is kind of just a problem of like, we need to get to Helium. And then it's like, I'm getting married and I don't want to. I don't want to get married. I want to get married. Stop that, please. Right. Yeah. Some Andrew Stanton quotes that, again, perhaps I might not say to a reporter before my movie comes out. The demon I'm chasing is, can I figure out what my story is before I run out of time? Theater's March. See my March. You know, he admits, like, the second act of the movie, I never cracked it.

1:49:08Griffin Newman:It sags. And I would agree. Like, the second act of this movie is pretty boring. First and third acts. More's happening. Action's a little better. You know, like, right. You know, he and the Pixar brain trust liked the reinvention of Carter. the family backstory, tortured Confederate soldier kind of thing. I don't really think that works,

1:49:27David Sims:but I get that it's something. This is what's also fascinating is the single most fascinating thing about this movie to me. So when the marketing is in free fall and the buzz is negative, there are all these stories about did Disney fuck it up or did Stan fuck it up with the marketing? Was he too confident weighing in too much of, you know, I want the trailer to be soundtrack to, the Super Bowl ad was set to cashmere, but the original teaser trailer was Peter Gallagher doing a cover of Arcade Fire's My Body is a Cage. It was like all these things in the marketing that were his personal tastes and they were like, does this make sense to audiences?

1:50:03David Sims:But then when Disney threw something out, that didn't work either. So one of the Hail Mary pass things they do for the marketing is they're like, how do we get people to like understand Andrew Stanton's track record and invest in the idea of him as a filmmaker. He does a TED talk where he explains the story of the Finding Nemo thing. We, of course, discussed in that episode where he had Marlon's wife's death and the death of all the other babies scattered as flashbacks across the movie, and the audience didn't like him. And that when he stopped being clever structurally and put it at the beginning, they understood his tragedy, and then they were with him the rest of the way.

1:50:40David Sims:And he, while promoting this movie, points at, I learned a very important lesson about storytelling that day. And then this movie does the opposite thing. This movie does the, why is John Carter so angry? Why does he have so much contempt for the military? Why doesn't he want to fight anymore? Why does he want to run away? And we're just going to keep giving you little flashes and focusing on the ring and something bad happened. You know it. It's not a surprise when it comes, but it's what he talks about learning with Finding Nemo of. If you let the audience experience it with the character, they feel it.

1:51:15David Sims:It's not like it's a satisfying twist ending to be, oh, oh, shit, something bad happened to him. It's if you can dramatically pull that scene off correctly, then the audience is endeared to that character. and this movie has the moment where it finally all like is shown to you is an abstracted flashback in the middle of what is his biggest action sequence. Big action where he's flailing

1:51:39Griffin Newman:wildly.

1:51:40David Sims:It's like an interesting conceit of filmmaking.

1:51:43Griffin Newman:It's a very much right where you're like wow that's a big idea. It's an idea. Huge. It's a big idea. But it's self-defeating

1:51:49David Sims:emotionally.

1:51:50Griffin Newman:I think it is and I really it's like the fact that it's his wife and child who do they burn up? Were they kill? We don't really They don't even fully explain it, but they show the aftermath of this. I'm just watching it. I'm like, I'm just kind of bummed out right now. I'm not feeling very triumphant.

1:52:06David Sims:But this is the Finding Nemo thing. If you start with that and then you get it out of the way and then the movie's fun, we can ride with it. If you drop it in the middle, it bums us out. And the scene that should be exciting then becomes really heavy. I watched that TED Talk and there's a lot of stuff around the buildup to this movie of Of storytelling, the importance of stories and being a good storyteller. And here is the secret. We at Pixar have cracked the secret of good storytelling, which at the time, as Pixar fans, we were all like, yeah, you have. You did. You absolutely did. But then you watch this movie and there are all these strange story choices that don't work.

1:52:48David Sims:That aren't in conversation with each other. No. Which is the thing about the Pixar golden run is that these things feel so holistic and so tight and they don't feel algorithmic. And you saying, David, like, why would he admit all this shit in a fucking New Yorker? Right. Right. He has always been a very frank interview subject. Right.

1:53:07Griffin Newman:Which is great. Good for him.

1:53:08David Sims:And I think he likes the idea of being a bit of an open source filmmaker like the guys you grew up with where he's explaining the process. And Pixar is so at the tip of DVD special features. We're showing you our mistakes. and it's like this is part of creativity is you get things wrong and then you learn and I think he's doing that because he's also assuming it's going to turn out the way the last two did. Right, it always worked out before. A lot of things didn't work and then we figured it out at the last moment.

1:53:35Griffin Newman:Because the end of the article is like it tested pretty well. We just held our first test screening and got a 75. Disney rounded that up to an 80 because it was unfinished and like there's the hubris of like you're hearing that and you're like well that doesn't sound that good that sounds okay a hundred right nine should at least be

1:53:53David Sims:involved right the iterative process which when he gets tagged a little with is this guy coming in way too cocky yeah and again it is this guy and he had this incredible success yeah not just as a director i mean you look at all the movies he helped write at pixar he kind of was like this guy who had the magic touch, who was sprinkling it all over. I've been making a serious effort to reestablish this in every episode on this series. It is really important to understand that he was the story guy at Pixar, that he is credited with being he was the best in-house screenwriter. He's the one who always was cracking stuff, taking the lead on the script, you know, launching the original idea.

1:54:37David Sims:Right. But ironically, this movie, it has some good things in it. There are aspects I like. it's not a good story. No. And, and, no, not really. We have barely talked, I mean, like, we barely talked about the Therns, which are a huge part of this movie that makes absolutely no sense. Which is also the biggest problem. It's the reshoot opening and what feels like such a clear reshoot of, we start with a big action sequence after a Willem Dafoe voiceover of, like, two warring parties that look silly. And they look so much alike. We don't know who's fighting and why. Talking grimly and you don't know what's going on And then it cuts to the actual superstructure of the movie, which is the Edgar Rice Burroughs thing, that this is a dramatization of the author of the book who is now changed into the nephew of the character who is being told of his uncle's death and is locating his diaries and reading the story.

1:55:34David Sims:Yes. I would not have done that. And then the story starts with John Carter on Earth. So it's like a rushing Nessingdal thing. Yes. Some of the structure in terms of Burroughs and finding his manuscript, that is from the books. That is something that he took from the books. But again, this notion of the thorns and what are they doing? Why are they doing it? Why do we care? What do they want? Eventually, there is that scene where Mark Strong does get to kind of explain what he is doing and why. But his explanation is wholly unsatisfying. And it doesn't clarify anything. And you're like, you know, there's all these scenes because, again, John Carter is a guy who jumps a lot.

1:56:16It's like, why don't they just kill this guy? And every time Dominic West is about to zap him, he's like, no, let him live. We must further study him. And you're sitting there going, they even have Dominic West being like, what's the point of all this if I can't use this thing? And you're like, he's right. Why can't he just kill this guy?

1:56:33Griffin Newman:What is the explanation? it's just the kind of dune-esque like our plans are measured in centuries but like the therns don't make sense no because are they like a parasitic race they like they say they like manage the destruction of planets galactic they like to manipulate they're just for like they're in it for the shits and giggles but they get their hands dirty what's that dune the Bene Gesserit. Is that kind of the thing? I mean, I guess so. That's what he sort of explains when he's in Mark Strong's character. But at least in Dune, they explain what... The name of that character is Matai Shang.

1:57:11Yes. Well, no, in Dune is... Bene Gesserit, they have a goal that they actually explain. And here it's just, we're going to...

1:57:17Griffin Newman:Yeah, these people are going to rule because we say so. It's a little League of Shadows-y from Batman of kind of like, we're always behind the scenes. Yes. Right. We're in charge of the ends of civilization. And they're also on Earth in the movie. They actually are watching and doing things on Earth. And they're immortal. And they live forever. And they only have one weakness. Being shot one time. Which happens two different times in the movie. Where these unkillable immortal beings are like, they sneak up behind John Carter and he shoots them once. And they fall dead immediately.

1:57:52David Sims:With a 1910 gun. Let's also consider, he's like, I don't want to do the thing where the movie has to start with an end. like spiel of at the beginning there was yada yada yada right and he's like the the edgar rice burroughs thing is a way to ease us into it to create a sense of mystery what was happening here it's giving us a slightly more relatable character a more modern sort of normal dude and then we sort of like slowly ease into all of this and then they do the screening and pixar is like this i would just like too much fucking happening because in that version he shoots the guy in the cave and then Mark Strong doesn't appear until like an hour and a half into the movie and start explaining stuff.

1:58:31David Sims:And they're like, this is too much to drop too late. So then they come up with the new opening where you cold open with him and the idea that something's going on here. And as admitted in the New Yorker piece, that realization that that needed to be an opening necessitated 18 new scenes. They were like, the ripple effect of this is if this is happening here, then this is this and this is this. And Disney's like, okay, we'll write you a check for more reshoots. Right.

1:58:57Griffin Newman:Because Disney is essentially like, you were on budget and on time. The first time. Yeah. Like the shoot was not a problem. At all. Right. And you made successful films. Yeah. And now you're saying you need reshoots and that's kind of how you do it at Pixar. Right. And you're in there. Right. So I guess the answer is yes.

1:59:15David Sims:And he's even saying, I'm here to sort of try to show Hollywood why our movies work. Right.

1:59:22Griffin Newman:why our process makes sense.

1:59:24David Sims:And that more movies should be like this.

1:59:26Griffin Newman:Let's iterate. Let's just like, right, you know, we...

1:59:29David Sims:Yeah, it's about seeing the whole thing and then going back and circling back. And what's fascinating to me is that everyone goes like, hey, dude, you fucked up. This doesn't work in live action. Go back to your animation corner. And then immediately it feels like the studios start making movies this way all the time. But like, what?

1:59:50Griffin Newman:Cheaper. Like, where the reshoots are not quite as involved. They're lazy. Right, yeah.

1:59:54David Sims:And they're just sort of like the first shoot is going to be almost a dry run. That's your first draft. Right. It's true, you're right. We'll make that a lot simpler and a lot shorter and if we don't have a finished script

2:00:05Griffin Newman:then let's just get what we need to get. Speaking to those kinds of movies that are coming, you do watch this and you're like, I guess I realize why every Marvel movie ended with them needing to close a portal and kill a bunch of guys because it's just kind of like the audience can grapple with these clear video game-y goals very easily. Whereas I'm watching John Carter, and that's before we get to the epilogue, which is the end of the movie, right? Which is not one minute. It's six or seven. And I'm just like, what does he need to do? And what will that accomplish? Right. Like, I get that Mark Strong is bad.

2:00:41Griffin Newman:Yes. Although I'm not totally sure how you kill him. You can shoot him one time with a gun. I'm aware that you could shoot him one time. Solar plex. But then I'm like, is Dominic West good or bad? Unclar. Bad, I guess. He's pretty. He's pragmatic. He's pragmatic. I guess. He spends a lot of the movie being like, I love you, Dejah Thoris. You can kill me if you want. Take my blade. And then at the end of the movie, John Carter shows up and he's like, death to you! Right. he's not a Gaston

2:01:13David Sims:but you're also like clearly the movie doesn't want me to want them to get married

2:01:18Griffin Newman:and like this wedding you know Mark Strong is like of course after they've exchanged their vows we'll kill her and that'll be the final step in us taking control of her city and I'm like why? He's like the fallout of that and I'm like why would that be good for you like that you killed the princess or what and he doesn't really I can't explain it except for the sort of like, I'm the puppet master and everything I do works out, you know.

2:01:44David Sims:Your question, Ben, this is a perfect example to me of a movie that does the exact wrong amount of explaining. You either need to explain way more or way less. Or just like, don't worry about it. Either you need to have a real specific answer that you can eventually sell us on, or you just need to be like, for century, these two species have been waging war. And just go like, they've just been fighting forever. They're different and they don't like each other. And instead they keep getting into it and you're like, I still don't think I have my arms around it. I know you're telling me stuff.

2:02:13Griffin Newman:And I never quite engage with like, do the Red Martians and Green Martians hate each other or just not vibe? Right. Because they're not actually at war with each other, but they don't like each other. Yeah. Yes. But the Red Martians are at war with the Therns.

2:02:27David Sims:But it also feels like the Therns are just kind of manipulating everyone to what end. Even we all make fun of fucking unobtainium, right? To your point of like, we make fun of the portal in the sky. We need the thing that's there. Yes. It's the reason these movies do this. Is they're just like, there is just one thing we're fighting over. Right. And this, you're like, what is the technology? There are several swirling around. What do they want to do? The thing is sort of the ninth ray, but they don't, again, they don't make it clear what exactly it can do. What that is, what it, right. How it works, where you get it.

2:02:58See, Deja Thoris has discovered it also in the beginning of the movie, and she's giving like a PowerPoint presentation about it.

2:03:05Griffin Newman:treating her like someone who's like, I found something called unobtainment, where they're like, you're making this up, or this is fringe science. There's a thern in disguise, which is another aspect of the therns that we may not have even mentioned, which is they can look like anyone and be anywhere. Yes. And then he like zaps her ninth ray with his ninth ray. Yes. And destroys it. And then somehow, you know, like everyone, again, no one believes her. And then she's going to have to marry Dominic West. and yeah, it's just baffling. Let's also acknowledge that... She's an inventor and we need to shout that out.

2:03:40Griffin Newman:She makes a... She's a woman in STEM. We love women in STEM. Yes. And she's a woman in STEM. We haven't discussed Lynn Collins. I saw on Letterboxd that you praised her performance in this film in a prior, not recently. Years ago, like when it first came out.

2:03:53David Sims:You've revisited this movie a couple times though. We noted that you've given it a couple at-bats on Letterboxd. I keep trying. I keep trying, yeah. because again, I like Andrew Stanton and this just feels like the kind of movie I should like and there's stuff in it that works and there is stuff in it that works like Tars Tarkis and the design of it I do kind of like going to Mars

2:04:16Griffin Newman:Mars dog works we haven't mentioned Woola who actually is a very good boy and is very likable I agree that he's a good boy he is kind of in and out of the movie I remember the marketing being like get ready to meet Woola That was also last gasp marketing. That kind of Despicable Me pivot to like, wait, should we go to the little guys? It's just Wolf. Right. What are the things that are testing well? And he was probably one of the few. But he's got a nice little face.

2:04:42David Sims:It's funny that he's like an alien dog with a lot of legs and he's really fast. It does also mean that sometimes the movie is just like zip and he's gone and then he's just back. That is that is shockingly pretty faithful to the book. He kind of like will tell him to stay somewhere and he'll just wait there, sadly, with the puppy dog face. And then a few scenes later, John Carter will be in trouble and who will save him? Wolla will come to the rescue. So that I mean, that is kind of again, it speaks to like the episodic nature of the book. The book was written as episodic. It was written as chapters, serialized in pulp magazines.

2:05:15Yes. So it didn't have like a superstructure of it's the story of John Carter doing this. It was the continuing adventures of John Cotter wandering this strange ethnographic. Here's some new cool shit I made up. It was an ethnographic report on this strange lost civilization on this other planet.

2:05:33David Sims:It's also why comic book movies are not adapted this way. You know, no one goes like, I'm going to try to adapt the first 30 issues of Spider-Man literally. Right. Because it was not written in a form that helps you in adapting to a closed loop narrative. You know? You more like extract the feeling. But Lynn Collins, who I know from three things, I think.

2:06:03Griffin Newman:I think when I'm looking, I mean, obviously she's got other credits, but it's like she's on six episodes of the first season of True Blood. Yes. Like she is out of that season before the season wraps. But it was a buzzy show. It was a very buzzy show, and she was like the bombshell, and she was the big hottie. Although the first season of True Blood, like all subsequent seasons of True Blood, is insane. And people die all the time kind of randomly, which is what happens to her. And then like, she's in X-Men Origins Wolverine the next year. She's also, she's another X-Men Origins Wolverine. And it was sort of like, who is this?

2:06:42How did she get this?

2:06:43Griffin Newman:But it had a little bit of this sort of like the studio being like, we found our next fucking huge actor. And I must acknowledge.

2:06:50David Sims:Kayla Silver Fox. I must acknowledge. She gets to give him the name, the Wolverine. Is that what you're going to say? No, no, no. To your great consternation and frustration, I must acknowledge she was a graduate of Juilliard. She was from Juilliard. So when she is discovered, it is also like, this is a serious actor. She has the chops.

2:07:08Griffin Newman:You know, she's in the Michael Radford Merchant of Venice movie without Pacino as Portia, which is an incredibly important role in 2004 when she's barely been in anything. Yeah. I have not seen that movie.

2:07:21David Sims:Neither have I. Like, there's no. I'm sure Pacino gives a subtle, sensitive performance as Shylock, the money lender. That was one where I. I look. I saw the poster and I was like, this feels like an attack on my people. I studied

2:07:37Griffin Newman:Birch of Renaissance School. I know the play very well. I've never seen the movie. I should watch it. I'm just looking at it. I know. It was one of those movies that was DOA, obviously. But, like, that she had that role, unless she stinks in it, which is possible, I should watch it. Like, that's definitely, that's a sign of some chops. It also feels

2:07:55David Sims:like, you know, a couple years later Pacino discovers... Well, she's very good in Bug. Yeah, I haven't

2:08:01Griffin Newman:seen that movie in a long time, but I don't remember her being I don't remember her. She's in number 23, although not in a big role, I don't think. She plays number two. What do you remember?

2:08:15David Sims:It's not that I remember, but just a couple years after Merchant of Venice, Pacino discovers Jessica Chastain similarly, who is a Juilliard person. He does the wild Salome, Salome thing with her. And then it takes her a couple years for the industry to sort of like accept her. But it felt like both of them were a similar, like, Pacino has found a young female Juilliard bombshell who he is working into the classics and presenting as, I approve of this person. I think they have the goods.

2:08:47Griffin Newman:Which, like, by all means, Al. Like, that's fine. I don't like X-Men Origins Wolverine. It's a dogshit movie. I remember her role being incredibly thankless in it. Totally. I do not remember her being good at all in it. Like, she's a blank in that movie. She has a hat, I think? She's forced to explain a dream that involves a Wolverine. Cool. That's how he gets the name the Wolverine. She has, like, one of those lame powers where it's just like...

2:09:14David Sims:She's a human... You're like, oh, this is his human love interest, his tragic love interest before he became Wolverine. And then the reveal at the end is that she's a mutant whose power is that she can emotionally manipulate people. Right. Which feels, like, vaguely misogynistic. Yeah, she touches you. It's a woman who can make you just like.

2:09:33Griffin Newman:No. It's Will.i.am who has the hat. I'm sorry.

2:09:36David Sims:Will.i.am has the hat.

2:09:36Griffin Newman:Will.i.am's character was. I got a cowboy hat on my head. And he's in the movie.

2:09:41David Sims:She's in the movie playing a role. His character's name is Blink and he can teleport. Like Nightcrawler? Yeah. No, he's not Blink.

2:09:48Griffin Newman:No, he's not Blink. Isn't he? John Wraith. He's. Right. Yeah, he's at. The whole thing with X-Men Arjun's Wolverine was you could tell that Marvel was like. They were like, can we have Blink? And they were like, we don't even want to give you Blink. Like, you can have, uh, and like just dug in the bucket.

2:10:02David Sims:It also feels like HBO's Lanterns where they're like, no one will wear a costume. Everyone is wearing a leather jacket. Totally. Dominic Moynihan plays a guy who can turn light bulbs on. Which character is he? So he is weirdly. Chris Bradley?

2:10:16Griffin Newman:He's, yes, he's Chris Bradley, who was sort of known as Maverick. Maverick is how I would know him. He had been initially announced to be playing Beak, who is a Grant Morrison character who's like a living bird. Yes. And then I bet you someone was like, we'd have to like put a bird face on him. Can he just be someone who turns off light bulbs or whatever?

2:10:36David Sims:And then there's Agent Zero, isn't it, Ben? Who, of course, is a mutant whose mutant power is he's good at shooting guns.

2:10:43Griffin Newman:Yeah. This movie sucks. Like, Agent Zero's power is guns. Deadpool's power is sword. Like, you know, like, Will.i.am can teleport.

2:10:52David Sims:Wolverine, it is neither Lynn Collins nor Taylor Kitsch's fault. but for the infinite trust I had in Andrew Stanton the first warning sign was I've announced my two leads I've discovered the stars of tomorrow both of them are in the cast of X-Men Origins for free and I was like I feel like we should treat that movie as like a three mile island stay away at all costs especially since it ends on three mile island

2:11:17Griffin Newman:yes it sure does it's also funny in a thrilling and coherent sequence that movie puts Sabretooth just not in it no he's in it he's in it but like the take on Sabretooth is like he has sideburns and a jacket He's played by Liev Schreiber. And some little fingernails. You should Google Liev Schreiber, like, running as Sabretooth. And we're going to watch your face as you watch this man jumping like a dog. He's got like a dog gallop thing.

2:11:42David Sims:I think Liev Schreiber is the one good performance in that movie. He's got a take. He's not bad. He's got a take. But it's also funny that already less than 10 years in the X-Men franchise was like, we're just retconning everything. Now, here's Sabretooth, who is nothing like the previous Sabretooth and is also his brother. Yes, this is true.

2:12:00Griffin Newman:Do we think Lynn Collins is good in John Carter? I don't think she's bad.

2:12:04David Sims:I think this character does not work at all. No, it's kind of the same thing with Taylor Kitsch, where it's like, I don't necessarily dislike her. The problems are sort of putting her into this role, which has all these issues.

2:12:18Griffin Newman:The structure of it is way off. I find like I don't really get the accent she decided on. This kind of like vaguely English regally kind of accent. I mean, she hits it harder than I remembered. I'll give you that. She's also kind of similar to Natalie Portman in Attack of the Clones, as we talked about. Yes. She's like brown. Like, or bronze. She's red. Because she's a red Martian. She's a red Martian. But my wife kept being like, what's she supposed to be? And I was like, red Martian. And my wife was like, and that is? And I was like, what do you want from me? I don't know. I mean, like, desert-y, I guess, is the idea.

2:12:54David Sims:In the books, everyone is, like, bright red, which makes them look like aliens, even though they are otherwise humanoid. It is visually distinctive. I feel like Stan communicates that they thought it would feel a little silly and they wanted to make it a little more grounded. They end up at heavily tanned. They end up in this kind of, like, tribally tattoo. No, I also feel like the unspoken—

2:13:15Griffin Newman:It just feels like a college student who went to Morocco and still thinks they can be like that. It's very Burning Man. Yeah.

2:13:22David Sims:It's unspoken, but I have to imagine part of their concern was like, if they are bright red and too caked in tribal stuff, do we get into touchy Native American territory? I suspect that that was a consideration. Where they end up in trying to avoid that almost feels more uncomfortable. I would agree. And I think you're right. It's very Padme where it's like, what is your weird like mid-Atlantic accent? What is this skin tone? What are we culturally pulling from? None of this is her fault. He kind of makes the Star Wars decision of like all of the aliens and the villains are British, right? Like the humanoid, the sort of they're they're coded as kind of the Roman Empire.

2:14:03Griffin Newman:I'm casting people from the Rome TV show on HBO. To the point where, right, I do think like Mark Strong, Kieran Hintz, Dominic West, James Purifoy. like can we at least remove one of these guys like you've got maybe too many kind of UK Ireland it's four types of pig based meat

2:14:17David Sims:on one slice of pizza yeah

2:14:19Griffin Newman:yeah

2:14:20David Sims:I'm sorry David Schwimmer is in this I think just like a cameo is one of the Tharks because he's another random person who loves John Carter and Favreau also got Favreau did a little cameo alright I watched it what do you think what do you think good stuff it stinks you see you see his fucking nails grow

2:14:37Griffin Newman:his nails grow

2:14:38David Sims:he and he This is a movie that is so obsessed with not doing any goofy comic book stuff that they're like, well, you can't just have Sabretooth be a big WWE wrestler with like a mane of yellow hair and like big closet roaring. And you're like, why? Everyone liked that. And they're like, no, he's a guy who like talks quietly and his nails grow a little bit. Nails grow and he wears a black dust shirt. But then anytime it does something like him running on all fours, you're like, well, now that's twice as silly because you haven't built a movie that can support comic book-y shit. it's so bad. It's so weird.

2:15:11Have you, you haven't seen this movie? I truly was thinking

2:15:15Griffin Newman:when you were talking about it, I mean, love Wolverine. Sure. He's my guy. We love Wolverine. I don't remember this at all. This is another franchise death thing. He's got to Google another thing then. Deadpool, Final Battle. Yeah, Final Battle, Deadpool, and you got to see what they make Deadpool look like.

2:15:32David Sims:So Ryan Reynolds really wanted to play Deadpool like early on. He called dibs on that. Yeah. And I want to make my own movie as Deadpool. Then they go, we've written Deadpool into X-Men Origins Wolverine. This is a good launching pad. But it's going to be early Deadpool before he really becomes Deadpool. So he's just Wade Wilson, a Merc with a mouth. He looks like Ryan Reynolds. He's a mercenary. He's Ryan Reynolds with a red tank top who's got double swords. And then they decide, fuck, he popped in the first act. He's the only thing people like in this movie. And we dispense of him. So they do extensive reshoots to make Deadpool the villain at the end of the movie where they've kidnapped Deadpool and tortured him and made him into like a mega mutant where now he has like seven different powers.

2:16:14David Sims:He has Cyclops' optic blast. He has katana arms. He can teleport. Just like John Wraith, everyone's favorite teleporting character. And Ryan Reynolds is like, I refuse to do this. So Scott Adkins, legendary. The great Scott Adkins. Martial artist. Action hero. King of the DTV action movie is in Ryan Reynolds' makeup as mouthless Deadpool, which is a joke to spite the fans of, well, Deadpool was famously the merc with a mouth. Danny Houston, the second of four actors to play William Stryker. There's been a lot. Keep saying, why won't you shut up, Wade? And so when they do all these weird operations on him, the first thing they do is sew his mouth shut.

2:16:55David Sims:Right. You know, that thing that everyone hates when Deadpool can make jokes during action sequences.

2:17:00Griffin Newman:To be fair, I did grow to hate it. We do hate it, but it has made billions of mouths. I'm going to say confidently that John Wraith, a.k.a. Maverick, is... No, those are two different people. John Wraith, a.k.a. what? What's his name? I don't know. Wraith. I think it might just be Wraith. I think his name is Wraith. Maverick is Moynihan. Yeah, exactly. Dude, I can't watch this anymore. This is dog shit. But this was... No, he is called Maverick. You guys are thinking... You guys already forgot what the other guys called. Why is this? This is no goodness.

2:17:30David Sims:They had made the third X-Men, and they were like, Like that is the proper end to the trilogy.

2:17:34Griffin Newman:Oh, Bradley was also known as Maverick. There we go.

2:17:36David Sims:Wow, they did it for both?

2:17:37Griffin Newman:Kestrel.

2:17:38David Sims:The Wikipedia says John Wraith's other name is Kestrel. They were like, X-Men was a trilogy. We are done. And the ongoing future of the X-Men franchise is doing spinoff origin movies. We're going to do everyone's backstory. Magneto was supposed to get one. And this one bombs so hard, they take the script for X-Men Origins colon Magneto and retrofit that into first class. Yes. The sort of Nazi hunting stuff. was supposed to be the whole movie. Kind of pull it off.

2:18:04Griffin Newman:Yeah. Kind of pull it off. That movie kind of works. I think Wraith is, okay, so the most famous X-Men who teleports is Nightcrawler. Obviously, yes. Number two is Blink, I would say. Blink was a very popular character for a while there. Yeah. Number three, with a bullet, I'm going for magic. I was going to say, magic has to be number three. Because she can dimensionally travel and all that. Yes, and she has a cool sword. Number four, let's talk about him, Nightcrawler's weird brother, Azazel. Is that how you say it? I don't, I never even know how to say it. Or Azazel. Azazel? Azazel? He can do kind of like red teleporting.

2:18:32And I say Azazel? And he's Nightcrawler's dad, which gives him, like, he's a Nepo daddy.

2:18:36Griffin Newman:But it's red, because he red, instead of blue. Red cloud. Instead of blue. Yeah, blue. And Mystique is his mom. Yeah, that's true. Number five, I think it's got to be Pixie. Pixie can teleport, and she was hot in the 2010s or whatever. Yes, yes. Like, Matt Fraction era, maybe? Correct. I think I'm comfortable putting John Wraith at six. Good. I can't think of anyone that would go above him at this moment. Everyone else listed with teleporting powers are people like Hope Summers who just copy other powers. Or people like Apocalypse who just kind of have all the powers. It's a bonus. That's his 20th power.

2:19:12David Sims:It's also funny. And then we're going to close the loop on X-Men Origins Wolverine. Maybe we reopen it again. We're just counting X-Men, right? X-Men Universe. Because Lockjaw is obviously a better Marvel teleport.

2:19:23Griffin Newman:And you know what? There was that Gateway character. Oh, Gateway. We did forget Gateway. way. So maybe he's, maybe Raid's down to eight. Raid's gotta be, she makes Star Portals. She makes Star Portals, that's true, but she's not really X-Men, right? No, I'm saying if we're opening it up to Marvel.

2:19:38David Sims:They're like so afraid of letting any of these characters be comic book-y, but they also include Blob, who had been cut out of all three mainline X-Men movies up until that point.

2:19:48Griffin Newman:They do, but I feel like their take on Blob is like he's large, has suit on, like has like a makeup

2:19:55David Sims:suit on aesthetic suit but like he's not actually blobby he's kind of tough no their take is rather than blob's power being like this endless kind of growth of mass that it like has so much power behind it they're like he was a guy whose power was bulletproof skin and then he let himself go that is the take i forgot be like an extension of a mutant evolution they're just like this guy just eats too much junk food now. Yes. Wolverine served with him in the war and he was really cut and then he goes to a boxing gym and he's just a fat ass eating Cheetos. It's the classic problem. And they make fat jokes for five minutes.

2:20:31David Sims:And he has a voice. They gave him a voice. It's Kevin Durand,

2:20:35Griffin Newman:who I always enjoy. A lovely actor. Like, that X-Men Origins Wolverine problem of where they're like, meet all these new characters. Oh, okay. No, no, no. Meet them later when they suck. We'll meet them before they're cool. We'll see them for two minutes at the start and then later he'll rebuild a team that you don't know anything about.

2:20:52David Sims:You only see them before they figure their thing out and after they're washed up. And then we kill them.

2:20:58Griffin Newman:And then they all die immediately anyway, so who cares, right? Okay, so... Can't believe that movie didn't work. Yeah.

2:21:16David Sims:John Carter. John Carter. John Carter origins Wolverine. Here's another story issue this movie has, in my opinion. I forgot Thomas Hayden Church is the bad Thark. He's doing a voice. It doesn't even sound like him, really. No, it doesn't. He's kind of going, Yeah. You basically give John Carter the Dorothy Wizard of Oz thing of, all I want to do is get home. I don't want to be here. Right before I got teleported, I discovered a cave full of gold. I was running away from the cavalry.

2:21:48Griffin Newman:They were going to kill me, but now I'm about to be so rich. Save my city. Become our warrior. And he's like, where is the exit? Get me back to the gold cave. It's not just I miss home, but he keeps in looking. Cranston's getting all the gold.

2:22:03David Sims:He's like, I was a minute away from being a millionaire and owning, you know, the railroads and whichever, which you already know he succeeded in doing because when Ned Burroughs is called to his dead uncle's estate, you see that he is now a very wealthy man.

2:22:19Griffin Newman:Oh, and we know for sure he is definitely dead, right? Oh, yeah. They really sell it. It's so weird. His tomb can only be opened from the inside. It's almost like it's a weird puzzle thing. Anyway, here are his books. Here's the picture of vim and vigor. Yeah. Not five minutes before he passed. It is funny how Taylor Kitsch, again, 29 when he makes this movie, he's like the performance of him being like, call for my doctor. Might as well get the attorney to you while you're out of the deal. And it's like, very well, sir. I do love any movie where they create the device of this thing will make you look dead for 15 minutes.

2:22:54A little thing. Puffer fish. Puffer fish. It's a venom of a puffer fish. Is that, I don't even know.

2:23:01Griffin Newman:Is that a thing? Can we, I would. I think in the days before EKGs, heart rate monitors, possibly you could simulate coma.

2:23:10David Sims:There were more. I don't know. There were more primitive versions of NyQuil and people would just accept.

2:23:15Griffin Newman:I guess this guy's fucking dead. I've never seen someone sleep that hard. You got to think if they were real, the Jackass guys would have used it in one of their movies. This is a good point. It would be an incredible actual prank to be like, okay.

2:23:25David Sims:The final prank of Knoxville died. Do we think the Jackass 5, Jackass Best and Last, which is coming out shortly after this episode's release. Yeah, it's coming out pretty soon. The trailer dropped today. It dropped today. Do we think they try to do a Flatliners? That does feel like the final frontier.

2:23:41Griffin Newman:Kill me and then bring me back. Can we do it? It would be appropriate given the theme of this is the last one.

2:23:47David Sims:Best and last.

2:23:48Griffin Newman:Yeah, I do feel like I worry about them, like the sort of narrative they're putting forward with it of like, we know that as the last one, this has to be like the biggest one ever. I'm just like, I really just enjoy y 'all being together and having fun. Like, I don't need you actually to try and top yourselves. You're older. Like, I think your physical peaks have passed. We don't actually want them to die. We enjoy their combination. Not only not die, just like, whatever. Like, just have fun, guys.

2:24:16David Sims:My read on that situation is that that was very much their intent for four. Right, and then COVID fucks with four. Exactly. And so I think Knoxville and crew got a little itchy and were like, we didn't really get to do everything we wanted to do on 4. And people loved 4. 4's really good. And they got a lot of, suddenly, now everyone, critically, every Jackass movie has gotten better reviews than the one before it. It is the funniest thing, this phenomenon, and Jackass is the best example of it, where the fourth movie comes out is a New York Times critics pick and also is said, obviously not as good as the earlier entries.

2:24:49David Sims:Right. And you're like, all of these were trashed at the time.

2:24:52Griffin Newman:They were seen as a sign of a declining culture by older critics and all that. They're actually the best of us. Right, right. So anyway, puffer fish venom. We're going to taste it. Yeah. Right. You put it in the Spider-Man coffee. You just didn't mention it. Yes, I did. So we're all about to attain a certain comatose state. Definitely.

2:25:10David Sims:And then hopefully our nephews will send us to Barstool.

2:25:12Griffin Newman:Okay, so the idea is that a copy of him has been made. This is a thing the movie also makes no sense. It's a bit of an avatar.

2:25:18David Sims:Weirdly, it's a bit of a, like, your body's actually on Earth. Well, they say they sent a copy just like a telegraph, which is not how telegraph works. which is a very funny explanation where he's like, it's like a telegraph. They sent a copy. And you're like, that's not how a telegraph is. That's some 1912 shit.

2:25:32Griffin Newman:This is stupid to even ask, but we see that when he comes back to his body that the colonel is like bones now. Yes. And he's been there for a really long time. Does he shit his pants? Great question. Which person? Which person? Is that breaches? Is John Carter's breaches just full up? He hasn't been eating. Yeah, but that's... He's just been laying there. He's not in a regular coma. What are the rules? We don't know. He's not in a regular coma. He's in like a, your spirit and body have been transported to Mars coma. A thern coma. So maybe he is truly like just frozen in time. Suspected. It's fascinating.

2:26:14Griffin Newman:If you're in a regular coma, you do poop. Yeah. It's all happening.

2:26:18David Sims:But it feels like a prestige where, oh, at this moment, a new version of you is being made that is... birthed at this other spot. God, yes. Right? Yes, that is what happens. Because Avatar, it's like, we've built a thing, we've placed it there, and now we're going to transfer your consciousness. Yes. And there's one consciousness going in between the two. But in this, it is, at this moment, you are copied, that copy is sent there, Right. and your consciousness is being transferred.

2:26:45Griffin Newman:But I think copy is misleading because his Earth body is just lying in the cave. Right. So it's not, copy sort of suggests, like, there are two John Carters walking around on two planets. You know what I mean? There are two John Carters, but only one of them can walk at a time. There's just one then, really. The other one's... They're two bodies, though. The body needs to exist, we assume. One Carter, two cups. And which one's pooping? I'm just saying, give me a big old Rumpelstiltskin beard. Yeah. I did. That would be fun. I had the same thought, which is why isn't... Yeah, shouldn't he have a big old bushy beard when he wakes up?

2:27:20And also maybe have like birds that built a nest on his head.

2:27:24David Sims:And can he wake up in the 80s? Can he, like, wake up with the beard and be like, where am I? And then he hears, like. Blondie on the, like, someone's, like, cruising by. And he peeks his head out, and he's in the back of a Sam Goody's.

2:27:38Griffin Newman:All good ideas. Where on earth am I? Right now, I'm Andrew Stanton sweating. I'm like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah, no, maybe, maybe, maybe I do that. Maybe, yeah. I do like when he wakes up back on earth, and there's, like, crackling noises. Yeah. He's all dusty. I mean, that is kind of fun. And yeah, he looks over and Bryan Cranston's a skeleton man. That's kind of fun.

2:27:56David Sims:I like the Cranston sequence. I like the him constantly trying to escape and getting put in more and more restraints.

2:28:03Griffin Newman:The Cranston sequence is fine. I think the movie, it's interesting because like the Mars adventure ends with him falling in love with Dejah Thoris. Getting married, which I would say is. Marrying her and becoming the Prince of Helium. A little unearned that they get there that past. It is fucking complete. They only get married, I feel like, because they're like, I mean, all the wedding shit's already here. So I guess we'll do that. They marry Spaceballs.

2:28:27David Sims:They've kissed one time, implied because he forgot he wasn't talking to his dead wife. And then he immediately walks away and apologizes. And then, like, it feels like six hours later they're married. Their chemistry is not, like, very electrifying. It feels like they get married in the movie because they get married in the books. And they probably get married in the books because it's like, wow, you're a dirty single woman. I'm doing you a favor. It's 1912. Yes. In the books, they get married. And then even though they don't describe it, this is like literally one paragraph. They say like 10 years past.

2:28:57He basically there. He lives there for 10 years. They have a egg, not even a full bone. Like they don't she doesn't give birth to a child like a baby. She somehow they don't get into the details, produces an egg. And the egg is about to be born when he is pulled back to Earth in the book. and there's this whole thing that is, again, not in the movie at all, involving the atmosphere factory that creates the air of Mars where it stops working. They've established earlier in the book this atmosphere factory and if it ever goes down, there's going to be a big problem. At the end of the book, it goes down.

2:29:32He heroically goes to save it or, like, repair it. He's the only one who can do it. He knows the secret password that can open the unopenable door because he's awesome. The secret password of Ned.

2:29:44Griffin Newman:Yes. he opens, thank you, he opens the door and is like, he doesn't even understand why he's like sucked back to Earth and then has to figure out how to get back to his wife and his unborn child. And that's the end of the book. It ends on like a huge cliffhanger, which this one really doesn't. The other thing about the marriage, which we haven't mentioned one time, I feel like we should at least mention, is in the book, he and everyone is naked on Mars. Oh, sure. He shows up totally naked. They describe how all the Tharks are naked. And Dejah Thoris is naked. The whole book, everyone's just running around with their hogs hanging out and whatnot.

2:30:25David Sims:Most of the visual sort of history, cultural memory of John Carter is from when Frank Frazetta does a bunch of editions of Frank Frazetta. Frank Frazetta is like sort of the main Conan artist, you know, that sort of classical kind of oil painting, barbarian look. And And they were very scantily clad. Like it was sort of like Dejah Thoris is wearing like a ribbon. A bikini. Yes, very skimpy. And John Carter's wearing like the skimpiest loincloth. And so that was another thing where Sam was like, that would look silly. It can't be that cheesecake-y. I think the furthest this movie could successfully go and sell me is that by the end of the movie, he's identified that he's fallen for her.

2:31:11David Sims:that they have a connection and then he gets that back and that's why he wants to go back. You can't sell me. By the end of it, they've settled. We're obviously madly in love with each other. I'm ready to be here forever. Right.

2:31:22Griffin Newman:I mean, because that is, the movie is like, right, the triumph is he's decided to be John Carter of Mars. Right. He's going to throw away the medallion. He throws away the medallion. He's going to, like, this is it. His new life is here. In the kingdom where he now lives. Right. The medallion that he sometimes is like, he literally leaves behind in places. and in other times is like desperately like scrambling to grab it.

2:31:43David Sims:There's such a focused shot when he's jumping away the first time with the medallion there. He has left it behind. And I go, oh, right. So the movie is going to be he doesn't realize this is valuable and the rest of the film is he has to get the medallion back. Which feels like a cleaner thing to track in terms of us saying like, what is the movie? Like, what are the stakes? What is he gunning for? If it's, oh, he left the fucking ruby slippers behind. Yeah, just give it to Dominic West. Have him have it the whole time. In order to get back to the gold cave, he's got to get the medallion. And that's what's driving him the whole movie.

2:32:12David Sims:That's what keeps him in the battle. Stan, like a year or two after this movie came out, was like, well, seems like they're never going to be sequels. I'll tell you some of the stuff I was thinking. And posted like the logos for the sequels and his opening for the second film, which was it was going to open with the story of John Carter being told. And then the reveal that it was Dejah Thoris telling it to their son. Okay. And that's like opening title. then it cuts to John Carter like in the coffin Ned activating him him going back up he gets there many years have passed Deja and the son have gone missing and the movie is him trying to find them and then discovering the atmosphere machine okay right so it feels like it rushes to the wedding because he's already like planning out I want to start with the kid but look this is fucking trilogy brained bullshit that fucked up the 2000s

2:33:03Griffin Newman:but whereas to bring it up one more time Avatar. Yep. The end of Avatar, they shoot the villain that you hate full of arrows until he dies. Yes. Witch rocks, and I clap and cheer. Yeah. Humans leave, home tree is saved, Awa has heard us. Yeah. Great. And it's like, oh, what will the sequels be? And it's like, we'll figure it out later. I don't care. Right. You need an ending and a sense of triumph. And here the triumph is like, well, we definitely took Mark Strong off the board, and I'm like, okay. And I get to be the prince, and you're like, Prince of Helium, what does that mean? I don't know.

2:33:37Griffin Newman:Look, I've decided to live on Mars and that's what's important.

2:33:39David Sims:There was 10 to 15 years of this as a fucking cancer in the industry and I blame Lord of the Rings for all of it and it's so annoying that they never stepped back and went, oh, right, but Lord of the Rings was a trilogy of books that worked on paper. We were adapting a thing that was rock solid versus anytime there was a new attempt at a franchise, whether it was adapted from something or original, it was littered with all of these threads that were, and that's going to be really important in the second movie.

2:34:11Griffin Newman:Right.

2:34:12David Sims:The third movie is going to pay that off.

2:34:14Griffin Newman:Right.

2:34:14David Sims:And there was a lot of, I think, backlash against this movie that was the anger from audiences having seen this 15 times already of, I don't want to watch the movie that's telling me how good the next movie is going to be. Make the fucking movie right now.

2:34:32Griffin Newman:This problem moved to TV, obviously, which, you know, has its own similar issues.

2:34:40David Sims:It's the thing that Marvel cracked that helped for a while, which is, oh, Thor 1 doesn't need to be setting up Thor 2. No, it sets up Thor 2 by existing. And then what it's setting up is your continued investment in the Marvel Universe. Little tease of Captain America. Right. And the sequels to each sub-franchise are kind of standalone. Yes. they aren't feeding off of the things set up here or there or whatever. It's more just the larger buy-in. You feel like you're kind of getting a complete meal, and then they're teasing you with what the next meal is going to be. A lot of the ones that don't work were the ones that avoided that and instead tried to make it too heavy on lore.

2:35:19David Sims:And like Doctor Strange, like, oh, the whole first movie, Baron Mordo is his friend, and at the end he's like, I might think about being evil.

2:35:26Griffin Newman:He's still thinking about it. He's still thinking about it.

2:35:29David Sims:Ten years later, he's like, maybe. Do you think Chiwetel's agent calls once a week, once a month, once a year? I heard you guys are doing an Avengers movie. He'll be in that one, right? What about Mordo? And you still own his ass? Like, you still have him under contract? When's he going to be a baron? Okay, my Jetix.

2:35:47Griffin Newman:Jetix? Jetix. Jetix. Anything else we want to talk about? As far as John Carter, anything from the movie we haven't covered? Which John Carter? Of Mars. There's nothing else I want to talk about. I have seen this movie three times, I think. Same. I have always thought that it's an impressive swing that doesn't work. The first 45 minutes to an hour, every time I watch it, I'm like, does this work? There's nothing about it that I out and out hate.

2:36:18David Sims:Shame.

2:36:18Griffin Newman:There's very little of it that I love, though. Like, there's nothing that I'm like, I'm unambiguously into it. There's a good amount of stuff I like. I would agree with you, but there's nothing I love. Like, Jupiter Ascending, which also has, like, flying bug ships, right? is much more my vibe. Same. Because like that one, just as much as it's silly and insane, does a little bit of a better idea giving you like the power struggles. I agree.

2:36:42David Sims:Because it simplifies them. Every performance is big. I was going to say,

2:36:46Griffin Newman:it's also bigger. It's like more bombastic. It's messier, but it doesn't feel... And it has that Wachowski, I don't give a fuck thing that this one's, like you're saying, it's like, we could be the next Star Wars. The two presenting's like, we're not the next anything. This is just crazy, okay?

2:36:59David Sims:It's also this weird balance of this movie doesn't feel that studio managed outside of maybe the kind of nerfing of Lynn Collins character down to like the most one dimensional dance. Yeah, sure. That definitely does. It feels pretty pure, but it does feel like they're not self-censoring, but they're so in their heads about how do we make this cool versus how do we make like it's the Disney

2:37:26Griffin Newman:problem, right? Like they're always a little too worried about being uncool because they know they're not

2:37:30David Sims:Tron Legacy has that whole thing where you're like, everyone loves this first movie, but also it was too nerdy at the time. Can we make this a little more badass? I just think the iterative, we're going to reshoot it three times, we start filming with an unfinished script kind of thing, we'll fix it in post, we'll find the story beats later, we'll fill in the gaps, becomes how basically almost every Marvel, DC, and Star Wars movie is made. It's more the exceptions to the rule, the ones like The Last Jedi, where you're like, that seemingly was what they planned. They shot it the way they wanted to.

2:38:04David Sims:Every other Disney Star Wars movie was by all accounts made like this. And Usainc Sims, I wish they would write the fucking book on Rise of Skywalker.

2:38:14Griffin Newman:Certainly.

2:38:14David Sims:Notably, there used to always be these very transparent making of books and Lucas would allow the making of docs. There was one that was announced for Force Awakens and then was pulled and canceled. something you know nothing about, Matt Singer, when you write an entire book and they don't let you publish it. Oh, yeah. No, that's never happened to me that I can speak about on the record. But the answer was they changed a lot of shit substantially. And I think learning a little from the lesson of John Carter, they're like, we don't want people to know that we didn't have it all figured out from the get go.

2:38:49David Sims:Yeah. We don't want to communicate to people that we figured it out on the go. But then you get disasters like Justice League being shot two complete times, Solo being shot two complete times with different directors that are this again. And like Disney is the one who is more often than not greenlighting movies and allowing them to happen this way. And it was a too big to fail thing where the Star Wars movies and the Marvel movies in particular kept on just making enough money that it wasn't stupid to spend$300 million to shoot a film three times. I just, again, it's just, to me, it's like, I agree with what you said, David.

2:39:30I would also just say, it's like, you noticed on my letterbox, I keep watching it. It's like a movie. It's a movie that I'm sort of inexplicably drawn to, even though I don't particularly like it. It's like a classic five out of 10. It's like, I wouldn't say I like this movie, But I guess maybe it's just because I do like and respect Andrew Stanton as a filmmaker that I'm just always trying to figure out where did it go wrong?

2:39:52David Sims:I think there's something kind of pure about it, right? It's very pure in its intentions and it doesn't feel that meddled. and so even if the movie feels a little self-conscious and a little bit wary of like letting its freak flag fly the other movies we're talking about are you get to something like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness which was by all accounts shot 27 times what are you talking about?

2:40:15Griffin Newman:that movie every just scene to scene flows with no issues

2:40:19David Sims:every time Elizabeth Olsen does an interview she's like at a certain point I don't fucking know

2:40:23Griffin Newman:yeah she's in the Lynn Collins thing of like just tell me where to stay tell me what to do

2:40:27David Sims:Two versions ago, I was the hero. Now I'm the villain. Is this before WandaVision or after WandaVision? And that's a very managed movie that doesn't feel cohesive, but has like explosive ecstatic sequences that fucking rule. Yeah. It has flashes of Raimi shit. But you're also like, this is a weird exquisite corpse of a movie. And in an odd way, John Carter feels more coherent to me, even if it can't figure out what it's saying. It is like a straight line. Sure. I mean, it's clear that it is. No, I'm agreeing. I'm saying it is you feel that the passion of Andrew Stanton for the material. It's just, you know, and look, a lot of times that is where the best stuff comes from is that love of the material and wanting to try to transmit what you loved about it into the film version.

2:41:12It just some something didn't get translated. He didn't get the Martian juice that magically translates. I don't know. But something got lost in the in the translation.

2:41:21David Sims:He's also just such a supreme visual storyteller, in my opinion, that you have sequences that feel really thoughtfully designed. It's not just that there's a cool creature. There's like really deliberate shot sequencing and rhythms where even if none of the sequences like fully levitate, they are well made versus the types of movies we're talking about, like Justice League, where you're watching an action sequence and you can tell the parts of this were shot three years apart. you're cutting in with random jokes and asides or this character got redesigned in post or any of that sort of stuff there is just a little bit of like I don't know there's a a clarity to this movie in its messiness that feels that I'm almost a little nostalgic for

2:42:09Griffin Newman:sure that's a nice way to put it and I there's a reason this era you know is gone right Right. And that the Marvel era happened, that superhero franchise era happened, and the superhero franchise era got out of hand too, but did have its highs.

2:42:29David Sims:It is fascinating to be talking about this movie in the year when Star Wars is about to return.

2:42:33Griffin Newman:Right.

2:42:34David Sims:And now we're in a new era. And Disney's Day is the big swing of, can we save Marvel? And both of these franchises are like on their heels being like, can you give me one shot to win you back?

2:42:43Griffin Newman:With Star Wars, I'm always like, you know, I'm like, Star Wars can continue to flop and will always be there for someone to kind of grab the ball years later if they want. Right. Like, I could buy pretty much three flops in a row, but like, who cares? Like, maybe 10 years. Marvel, the Doomsday thing, it's a little bit more like, if that doesn't work, a harder reset may be required. Yeah. Like, a very hard reset. I'm also, I'm watching this asking myself, what are the chances I prefer The Mandalorian and Grogu to this?

2:43:18David Sims:And I would love to be pleasantly surprised, but everything I see from the marketing of the movie makes me feel like it is going to be basically John Carter vibes.

2:43:27Griffin Newman:Interesting in that Favreau wanted to make a John Carter. I don't know, Mandalorian and Grogu look to me, it looks so good. I just know what it's about and it looks good. like that's the thing you know people on Twitter have been like Rise of Skywalker looks good it does it has sets it's got lighting choices right he's a very good DP flop movie we can all agree but it's crazy that now not even this new Star Wars movie looks like a Verizon commercial like what the fuck is going on

2:43:56David Sims:this is what I'm talking about where I'm just like they let Stanton shoot it his way they went to places they built giant sets you know they put people in a ton of costumes no I'm looking up I'll tell you. Okay, I was right. So we're talking about Favreau wanted to make John Carter, which has the Tharks, a lot of arms. I'm looking right now at Martin Scorsese's character in Mandalorian. He's got a lot of arms. He's not tall. He's not big.

2:44:21Griffin Newman:I believe. Like a little Thark. Martin Scorsese is playing a species that is the same thing that John Favreau is in Solo. I saw some tweet saying they were related. Yeah. And someone being like, I can't believe Scorsese is playing a glup shido, which is, of course, the sort of the internet term. No, we're that playing like Luff Shido's uncle. Exactly. Like, they're like, we finally got Scorsese to be in Star Wars. How fun. He's, who is he? Well, you remember the guy in Solo? No. Oh, I was hoping you did because he's his uncle. Like, you know.

2:44:51David Sims:It's very funny. I mean, like, everyone I know under the age of 10 seems a little excited by Mandalorian and Grogu just because it is the first Star Wars movie being released in theaters in their conscious lifetime. Yes. It's just, oh, right. Star Wars hasn't been movies. My kids are psyched. And I like Grogu, right? Every adult I know has no excitement for it, save for our friend, Alison Wilmore. She do love Grogu. Is not like overall excited for the movie. And I feel like this has not manifested that many times on Mike when we've been recording Critical Darlings. But before, after almost every record, she brings up how into Hot Jabba's son she is.

2:45:30David Sims:The Jeremy Allen White six-pack road to the hut.

2:45:32Griffin Newman:Look, Hot Jabba's son is at least a play.

2:45:37David Sims:Just every time Lawson and Fresh and I are shitting on Mandalorian and Grogu, she's like, but what about Hot Jabba's son? I wonder if I'm kind of buying the stock.

2:45:46Griffin Newman:Well, I'm told he's a large part of the film, I believe, right? He's like the third lead or something?

2:45:51David Sims:On the poster, I believe the billing is Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White, and Sigourney Weaver. There are only three credited actors on the poster. who's the villain? Great question. Great question. Truly. This is, I'm like, the movie has done nothing to sell me on what the story of this film is.

2:46:18Griffin Newman:It's an issue that I do not know what the story is, except like, Grogu will be asked to do a task and get distracted by some cheese nips or whatever.

2:46:28David Sims:Mandalorian is hired to do a thing and maybe the person who hired him isn't trustworthy. Right. Double crosses him, maybe. But if you're doing a movie that's the payoff of three seasons of television, even if those seasons of television are popular and beloved, I think your marketing immediately wants to communicate, this is why this had to be a movie. Here's a clean hook story we came up with that couldn't have just been an episode.

2:46:53Griffin Newman:He baby Yoda. He baby Yoda. He do be small baby Yoda. Let's play the box office game for John Carter. Yeah.

2:46:59David Sims:I don't know if you noticed, Ben, when you were watching it on the train with the woman looking over your shoulder. But at the end credits, when John Carter gets zapped back to Mars, it says John Carter and then of Mars fades in. And that was Stanton being like, I...

2:47:15Griffin Newman:It's my real title. Right. And then it goes J-C-M.

2:47:20David Sims:Like they have a logo. But I like fought to get it at the end. And I'm hoping that retroactively people just call it John Carter of Mars. And maybe it's sort of that he doesn't really become John Carter of Mars until the end. So the title changes. but of course this movie is dead on arrival and the sequel's ever happened.

2:47:35Griffin Newman:Yeah, just a couple more things from the dossier I should mention, of course. There was a lot of fighting over the marketing, which we sort of talked about, but it was Stanton who insisted on Cashmere being used, the Led Zeppelin song, in the trailer, even though...

2:47:48David Sims:That was the Super Bowl teaser that had... You were seeing clips from the movie and as the camera pulled back, you realized the clips were inside the letters John Carter as Cashmere plays.

2:48:01Griffin Newman:Some of the Disney executives were like, isn't that like an old song that young people won't care about?

2:48:07David Sims:He went for that. But this is where it's a perfect storm because then Disney goes like, you got to let us take control of the marketing. And then they make even worse decisions. When like Deadline was doing it sort of post-mortem on the box office failure, they had a bunch of marketing people from rival studios speaking anonymously. And one of them just said like, this is the most disastrous marketing campaign in the history of Hollywood. It is like going to be studied for decades. They fucked everything up.

2:48:32Griffin Newman:They made every mistake or whatever. By the premiere, the vibes are horrendous. You know, it's like the premiere was not celebratory at all.

2:48:41David Sims:Lynn Collins tells a story of watching Taylor Kitsch walking down the red carpet. Rich Ross, the boss of Disney films.

2:48:50Griffin Newman:The boss of Disney who is about himself to be fired. About to be fired. Kind of not over this, just over general sort of mismanagement of Disney, I feel.

2:48:56David Sims:He like whispers something into Taylor Kitsch's ear and she's like, I watch him react as if he's been struck by lightning, and I follow him and go, what did he say? And he said, the head of Disney just leaned in and whispered, it's a disaster.

2:49:10Griffin Newman:Oh, wow. Before the premiere. And then they went down the press line. Collins says she thinks she bore the brunt of it. At one point, she says Taylor went on to continue to work. He did Battleship and other things. And I think she's just kind of forgotten that Battleship was the same year. Yeah, he'd already been working on that. He did make more movies, but he no longer was allowed to be the star of a movie.

2:49:35David Sims:They had different problems. I feel like everyone learned Taylor Kitsch's name, and he became the shorthand for guy being shoved down our throats in movies we don't want to see, versus she kind of just retreated back into anonymity. But she talked about that her reps, the week before it came out, said, you're going to just need to hide out. You need to disappear for a year or two. that everyone around her was kind of telling her, you're radioactive. And she, yeah, like fired the whole management team.

2:50:06Griffin Newman:And she no longer, I mean, it's not like she's never worked again. She did some TV. She was on Walking Dead for a year. But she obviously never made a movie like this again. No. And Tars Tarkas, he had, I mean, he had a lot of trouble getting work after this. Well, but he also, you're forgetting the sex game. I was about to say he had some off camera stuff. Some weird tweets. Weird tweets. Yeah. Should have left those eggs alone. what I'm saying. The film opens on March 9th, 2012 at number one at the box office, surely. Surely it's number one. Romley's birthday, I will say. It also was... Like the meme

2:50:39David Sims:with Anakin and Padme. He was like, number one at the box office, right? Number one, right? It was the rare case of usually movies that feel this ominous with the cloud over it. They keep pushing it off as far as they can. They pulled this one up. They were so... They were like,

2:50:55Griffin Newman:let's rip the band-aid off, baby. Let's make this a Q1 right there. In the summer.

2:50:58David Sims:And they were like, maybe in March it will overperform if there just aren't other blockbusters. I believe it comes out the week before the Hunger Games. That's a good question, actually. The first Hunger Games. That's the other thing. They were like, March, no one releases a blockbuster in March.

2:51:10Griffin Newman:We'll have the month to ourselves. It's two weeks before the Hunger Games, but a week before 21 Jump Street, which also is a hit. Wildly overperforms. Right. But it's opening to$30 million, which is bad because it costs a lot of money. If it had opened to$50, they would have been worried. If it opened at 50, it would have been a regular bomb. 30 makes it a kind of like bomb that gets written about in like the New York Times. The breaking point is like 600 or 700.

2:51:37David Sims:Many people think this might have been the biggest write down on a movie ever. But also, after this, studios stopped being as open about how much movies cost. Yes, that's true. It really did kind of change things where they were like, I don't know, it costs some money. What do you want from me? How much did Avengers Endgame cost? I don't know. The receipts are here somewhere. We never added them all. Papers. So many papers. After we add in the Blu-rays and the rights. That's another thing about this movie is for how much money Disney invested in it, there was no merchandising. There were no tie-ins.

2:52:10David Sims:I know. There's no merchandise spotlight. You didn't eat one pancake with Carter juice on it? I was looking this up. I mean, it's very telling. But it's also bizarre. We've got green, red pancakes and red pancakes. That stuff has to be figured out years in advance. Yeah. And that is often a way they help buffer the costs of these things. I can't buy it. Where it's like... There are Vinylmations. Do you have the Vinylmations? I've been looking for the cheapest one I can find on eBay. Vinylmation was a series of, like, kind of little LeBluBoo-esque blind bag figures that all looked like Mickey Mouse.

2:52:45David Sims:So they had his form factor in the ears, but then they'd paint them to look like other characters. And they made four Vinylmations. They made John Carter, Dejah Thoris, Tars Tarkas, and the White Ape. Everyone's favorite characters from the motion picture. The only pieces of John Carter merch that exist. But the fact that, you know, getting fucking Denny's to do a meal or whatever helps get them free marketing. Merchandising, these companies pay for the licensing. These things help cover the cost. And this was a movie that cost$260 million that was all just Disney putting their neck out. How they didn't make, you know, like John Carter Milk, like the white group that they stuck him in.

2:53:22I'll never know.

2:53:23David Sims:Just like no other ancillary sort of revenue streams on this. It's opening$30 million.

2:53:28Griffin Newman:It's going to gross$73 domestic. Yeah. $282 worldwide. Yeah. Which is bad, but like it is amazing how like even a bomb like this made almost$300 million. But it's number two. It's number two. What's number one? It's just hilarious to lose to this. It's the second weekend of an animated film.

2:53:46David Sims:It's a February holdover. In 2012. It's not Rio, is it? No. Perfectly good guess. Is it a DreamWorks?

2:53:55Griffin Newman:I think yes. It's an illumination, I think. No, so it's universal. Yeah. I can never remember who had what, when. Oh, is it the Lorax? Dr. Seuss is the Lorax. Over-performed.

2:54:06David Sims:Weekend 2, though. Because Lorax's opening weekend was 70? It was something crazy. And that was a movie that had an IHOP tie-in where they had pancakes with a mustache on it. Yeah. Pancakes with a lollipop in the top of it, I believe. That was a 70 opening, right? Yeah, 70 opening. Yeah, crazy. So the second weekend is 40-something?

2:54:24Griffin Newman:38. 38. So it's dropping hard for an animated movie. But that's the thing where, like, you know, the guys at Disney are like, I mean, we'll beat Weekend 2 with a Lorax, right? And then Lorax just, like, poof, like, kicks you in the behind.

2:54:37David Sims:It is crazy that in four consecutive weeks, John Carter is the only movie that doesn't hit, where you're like, Lorax works. John Carter bombs. Hollywood generally is like, yay! 21 Jump Street. Right, right. Yeah.

2:54:49Griffin Newman:Hunger Games mega hit. So number two is John Carter. Number three is a comedy film that opened the week before with kind of like a kind of a format twist to it. Never seen it. Format twist. An R-rated teen comedy film. Oh, it's Project X. That's right. Never seen this one, which is a found footage comedy film. Found footage high school party movie. Because like it is not sinister, right? Like it literally is just about like what about the wildest party ever happened and you're watching it like videos from the party. No, there's no like supernatural twist. Yeah, it's nerds throw a party to be cool and one kid is filming it.

2:55:32David Sims:Does it get wildly out of hand perhaps? Oh, it goes crazy. Whoa. One weird thing about that movie is Miles Teller is in it. It's part of the early wave of Hollywood trying to make Mars Teller a star. Right, he plays himself. versus the Taylor Kitsch thing, what felt like a very slow evolution. But yes, he plays himself. His character is named Miles Teller and he's the coolest guy in school. Right.

2:55:54Griffin Newman:It's like, what if the guy from Rabbit Hole was a minor celebrity at your school? Yeah, produced by Todd Phillips. Yeah, and Joel Silver. That movie was really pushed. In your book, of course. But I feel like Project X was really pushed. It's like, that genius Phillips has found another great angle on it and it kind of wasn't a big hit.

2:56:14David Sims:It was called Project X because it was this top secret project. It was like Todd Phillips has come up with a radical pitch on how to reinvent the high school movie and they're keeping it under wraps. I auditioned for that one like six times for every fucking character. But it was Project X was the code name and then they just decided it sounded cool. They didn't. Did you audition to play Miles Teller? No, but I probably auditioned to play every other version in that movie. um

2:56:41Griffin Newman:uh it made 54 domestic I'm sure everyone was happy with that I was gonna say it must have cost 10 million bucks alright so now we're getting into weird number 4 is one of those early 2010s action movies war movies war is it act of valor? act of valor because that's such a weird

2:57:02David Sims:where you're like who does it star and they're like real soldiers Yes. Yeah. It was trying to do the 1517 to Paris. It was directed by two, like, action sort of stunt guys. Yep. House McCoy and Scott Wall. I remember the poster with just, like, shadowy figures of, like, soldiers in the distance. It didn't, you know, you couldn't see anybody. It didn't matter. They were going to do an act of valor. Yes.

2:57:23Griffin Newman:Pretty well and was also cheap. It made$81 million worldwide on a$12 million budget. Like, you know, I don't think it's a masterpiece, but it did exist and it made a little bit of money. Yeah. Number five at the box office is a horror film that had debuted at Sundance the year before. So January 2011. Oh. That has a very high concept sort of thing going on.

2:57:49David Sims:It's the Elizabeth Olsen one. That's correct. It's a real time. It's Silent House. I was going to say Safe House. Yeah. But Safe House is the Denzel Ryan Reynolds. I've never seen it.

2:58:00Griffin Newman:It's one take real time. She's being haunted. It's not great. Yeah. But it was all about the concept. It was, yes. It got a lot of buzz for being, yes, like a single take. And she was hot. And she was hot. That and Martha were at the same Sundance.

2:58:12David Sims:So there's this explosion of, holy shit, she's in two movies as the lead. And certainly Silent House is a skill piece because it's one take. How'd she do that? How'd she do it? And then they waited a year to release it, assuming that her star was going to explode. And by the time it came out, everyone was like, people liked this at Sundance? This sucks.

2:58:30Griffin Newman:Yeah, it sucks. No, it was opening number five. It only made 12 domestic. Number six opening at number six, which is bad news for this movie is the Eddie Murphy movie. 8000 words. Oh, that was a true nadir for it was.

2:58:43David Sims:It was a delayed several years. That's when Eddie Murphy goes into the wilderness and doesn't make a movie for like five or six years.

2:58:50Griffin Newman:Yeah, because like that is basically the kind of thing where it's like your name above the title seems to do nothing anymore. Yeah, it's like we're not even going to just clear like 30 million dollars on the fact that you're in a kind of family friendly comedy.

2:59:03David Sims:He had a couple family flops in a row, including Meet Dave and Imagine That. And then he signed on to do Tower Heist. And the promise of Tower Heist was it's going to be old Eddie. Right. He's going to be the wild card. He's going to curse. And so they pushed a thousand words to come out after Tower Heist and also after he was going to host the Oscars. So they were like, Eddie Murphy's about to have a comeback. And he did a great job. he's gonna do a raunchy movie with Brett Ratner and then he's gonna host the Oscars directed by Brett Ratner and everyone's gonna love Eddie again and we'll be in the Halo effect and Tower Heist bombs and he quits the Oscars because Brett Ratner is fired for using slurs.

2:59:43David Sims:Having used slurs in his life, yes.

2:59:46Griffin Newman:No, he used them right. He said like, let's not be a... On Howard Stern talking about

2:59:50David Sims:the Oscars he's gonna do. I mean, Brett Ratner had just never put a foot wrong until then. It's crazy. It's insane. Yeah. Yes. And then Brett was supposed to, my buddy Brett, was supposed to direct Beverly Hills Cop 4 right after that. He was like, I'm the guy who's going to bring Eddie back. I'm getting him to host the Oscars. He's going to do stand-up again. And Eddie retreats for years.

3:00:12Griffin Newman:Number seven is, wow, Safe House. They're both there. They're both in the top ten. So that's Denzel and Ryan Reynolds? Yes.

3:00:19David Sims:X-Men Origins, Wolverine's own Ryan Reynolds. Never seen.

3:00:23Griffin Newman:Daniel Espinoza. Extremely forgettable action movie. No one is safe in his house. I have seen that one. That was the old Doug Benson joke. What if there was a safe house? Yes.

3:00:32David Sims:But it is a real pre-pandemic, right? Movies like that used to just come out, make$100 million, disappear.

3:00:40Griffin Newman:Right, where you're like, what's the premise? It's like, have you not seen the poster? They both have guns. There were two stars. Right, there's two stars. These two guys, and there's a safe house. Will they shoot them at each other? Are they friends of the enemies? I don't know. Watch the movie. How about both? It gets figured out, probably. Probably. And you know, the apex of it being two guns. Yeah. Like, where are they like, it's Denzel and Wahlberg. What do they do? They're shooting money that's in the air, I think. I don't know. Maybe they'll have to shoot all of the money. Who could say?

3:01:05David Sims:Safe House was like the only hit Ryan Reynolds had in that run. Yes.

3:01:10Griffin Newman:You mean post-proposal of like him doing like action movies.

3:01:14David Sims:Green Lantern and whatever. But everyone just gave Denzel all the credit.

3:01:19Griffin Newman:Totally, because what the fuck? Who even knows what that movie is?

3:01:22David Sims:Yes, and then Ryan Reynolds goes into his forgotten indie phase where he's like, I'll be in The Woman in Gold. He tries some stuff. Buried. Yes, I'll do Mississippi Grind.

3:01:31Griffin Newman:He tried some stuff. And then he stopped. Trying stuff. Yes. And started making, I guess in his defense, oodles and doodles of money and running a cell phone company very well, I assume. I haven't checked in with them lately. It's funny that we used to have to do ad reads for them. I've done ad reads for that. I love Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile, I would use it if I didn't have other sales.

3:01:54David Sims:Matt, that's a great question. If the whole value of Mint Mobile is that he does the ads, why were they spending money to have David and I in like 2019 be like, I love dialing numbers and having a phone call go through.

3:02:10Griffin Newman:Number eight at the box office is the Channing Tatum, Rachel McAdams film, The Vow.

3:02:14David Sims:A big hit. This is the year where Channing Tatum manifests what Hollywood wants. all these other guys we're talking about to be. I'm going Channing Tatum, John Carter? 21 Jump Street. He makes sense. The Vow, Magic Mike are all in the same years. He would, he would be a good John Carter. And he could be funny. He could be funny. He could be dunked in the goo wearing a diaper. The Vow is one of those movies

3:02:37Griffin Newman:where you're like, is this based on Nicholas Sparks? And they're like, no, but that's what we're going for. Not literally, but metaphorically, yes.

3:02:43David Sims:Like weirdly based on nothing. No, based on nothing.

3:02:46Griffin Newman:Just original screenplay

3:02:47David Sims:about, I assume, Based on the vibe of all those other movies. It must have been a bestseller. It's serious 50 first dates. She gets amnesia and they're married and he has to make her fall in love with him again. Yes.

3:02:55Griffin Newman:Love it. Number nine at the box office. I assume it's great. Is another mega flop, much hyped mega flop of this Q1, which is This Means War. The McG. Yes.

3:03:10David Sims:Is that talked about in your book at all? No. No. Oh, yeah, I didn't get to that. That was like a 90s high concept spec buy that went through every permutation of, if they're never going to make a Bad Boys sequel, is this the way to re-team Will Smith and Martin Lawrence? And then there was a version that was supposed to be Seth Rogen and another kind of frat pack guy.

3:03:29Griffin Newman:It was going to be... Martin Lawrence was, like, often attached. Like, Bradley Cooper, Seth Rogen, Sam Worthington. At one point, they're like, should it be Martin and Chris Rock? Yeah. Like, kind of try to do a new Bad Boys with Martin and another, like, major black superstar? and like by the time they're like, we got Reese Witherspoon. That's fun. Yeah. So now it'll be spy versus spy versus the gray spy, the girl one. You know, because the old one was kind of more of a spy versus spy thing.

3:03:58David Sims:It was always them fighting over a woman.

3:04:00Griffin Newman:Right.

3:04:00David Sims:But I think the woman was less of a character. Right. And they were like, we've hired a megastar to play the woman. We've got to be caught that part.

3:04:08Griffin Newman:Then they get Bradley Koufer off of the hangover and then he's like, I want to do other things. And they're like, it's okay, it's okay. Chris Pine and Tom Hardy and everyone's like I guess like they're brand new like they're both like such recent stars

3:04:20David Sims:they picked the right guys but I tried watching that movie recently and they are just floundering it's a bad movie it's a disaster it's one of those movies where it bombs everyone says it's terrible and you go well how bad could it be and then you watch it and you're like oh it was bad

3:04:35Griffin Newman:it was bad it was bad number 10 of the box office is Journey to the Mysterious Island a big hit wow we hit three hours again Ben is a problem. This is a problem. I try, too. Bank check needs finessing. We got to do it. Don't worry. Our Martin Scorsese series, I'm sure, will be filled with lots of shorties. Definitely.

3:04:52David Sims:I don't want to look. I don't want to call a shot. I do think the next two Stantons will be shorter.

3:04:56Griffin Newman:Uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

3:04:59David Sims:Yeah. Our guest for Dory, it could be some tangents. And he he's coming in with a full throated defense of its star. A full thoted. Did you say full thoted? Full thoted? Thot who's full? That's what you said.

3:05:13Griffin Newman:Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

3:05:15David Sims:It's a fascinating movie. And it is like, it feels like such a flashpoint. of everything that was going on at that exact moment, of what had happened before, of what's to come. And like, Stanton, unsurprisingly, takes it very hard. He does a piece, I think, with the LA Times, like six months after it comes out. Rarely does a filmmaker own a flop that quickly. Right, hop to it that way. And was like, I decided I'm going to take a year. I'm going to go to New York where my daughter's in school. I'm going to read books. Hey, love to read a book. I love to ride the subway. I need to pull back and reset my batteries.

3:05:57David Sims:What had also happened in the background is that, of course, Disney had bought Pixar. They start immediately saying, can we start up the sequel machine? They're begging for a Finding Nemo sequel. They always sort of have the respect of, we won't do it unless the original filmmaker approves. He oversees the 3D re-release of Nemo that I think is in 2011, the year before this. And he said that when he was overseeing it and he got to the scene where Dory says, where is my family? He went, there is possibly a sequel there. So he goes to Pixar and he says, I would let this happen. They hire a writer and he was not intending to direct it.

3:06:38David Sims:It was, I'm clearly in the John Carter business.

3:06:40Griffin Newman:Right, I'll be on Mars. Right.

3:06:42David Sims:I bring this up only because the obvious perception would be John Carter flops. He runs panic back to Pixar and says, can you let me do Finding Door? Kind of similar to Bird eventually doing Incredibles 2 after a flop or two. The reality is it was in the works and then he said, actually, maybe I want to do it myself. Right. But still, rarely do you see a director make these crazy big swings and then immediately, I see what you're saying. wasn't created with that in mind, but he does then go make a sequel. But there's really, like, how many careers are like this of animation

3:07:17Griffin Newman:to live action, back to animation, then TV, and then back to live action and animation in the same year? This is what's interesting, and we'll talk about it in the next two, three episodes. I'm looking forward to hearing this in the blink of an eye. I'd like to hear you guys talk for three hours about in the blink of an eye. We're gonna keep that one.

3:07:33David Sims:Ben's giving me a dirty look. The dirtiest look. But he is, like he is lucky and it's from his own doing that he has in his possession a get out of jail free card from the moment this movie flops. He is lucky. He's also lucky that he's already made Winding Nemo and Wally. Right. That's cool. That rocks. But saying, what if I want to direct Finding Dory? No one's going to question him on that. Absolutely. They're not going to be hovering over his shoulder. Oh yeah, totally. They're like, we trust that. You're good. You don't have to spend any time in movie jail if that's what you're doing next.

3:08:09David Sims:Yeah.

3:08:10Griffin Newman:Yeah. Say goodbye to Matt. I mean, he'll be back, but, you know, I think we got to wrap this up. Maybe. In three more years or whatever it's been. Has it been three years? Yes. It was when the book, when the last book came out. No, Matt. I think you're forgetting something. There was something we were on more recently. Informing. In fact, let's see if you've made like a five-time record. Planet of the Apes. I definitely have not. First Spider-Man. This is your fourth. Yes. Wow, it has been three years. What the fuck? What the fuck? Since Alien 3? We suck. We do suck. What a disaster. Also, that was three years ago.

3:08:42Griffin Newman:Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's actually maybe more the sticking point here. At a certain point, I was like, if I ever want to do another blank check, I better write another book. I better write another book. Apatow was in March Madness, and it didn't feel like he - I was feeling like, oh man, if he gets in, I'm - That would be perfect. I'm in. I'm golden.

3:08:59David Sims:No, we were overdue to get you on either way. Oh, great news. JJ has texted us, Sony taps Brian Hedgeland to script.

3:09:08Griffin Newman:Heldgeland.

3:09:10David Sims:I think it's Heldgeland. Zorro versus Django, which is another movie that has been in the works for so long, it was part of the Sony hack. I mean, because Tarantino wrote it as a comic book. I was going to say, didn't they make a comic book out of that already? I'm sorry. At one point, Gerard Carmichael was supposed to write it. Cool.

3:09:26Griffin Newman:So it's Django teams up with Zorro, the hero, the folk hero? Yes. Will Jamie Foxx be back? Presumably. But people don't realize all these things came from Zorro. This is the original. Isn't Jamie Foxx almost 60? I guess these things don't matter anymore. It really doesn't matter anymore.

3:09:43David Sims:Nothing matters. Interesting. Anyway. It's been a while, but I'm glad to be back. The book is coming out in October. Comes out October 6th. You can pre-order it right now anywhere you pre-order books. And please do. Please do. Yes, it's very helpful. And hopefully I can write another book and come back in three years and review Superbad or something. Crazy motherfucker. I do want to do Apatow.

3:10:09Griffin Newman:No, but that's not Apatow.

3:10:11David Sims:I know, but I'm just saying. Yeah, I want to do Apatow too. I don't think we're going to do Greg Atol. Apatow would be a great blank check subject. He would be. Yeah. It feels like the last couple years we've been pushing and people are like, why? And this year in March Madness, people got it for the first time.

3:10:26Griffin Newman:He did win a matchup. He did. I was watching. I was voting.

3:10:30David Sims:And it felt like we have enough distance from it that it's worth studying in the way that you did in your book. Well, I certainly think so. And if people agree, they can check out the book. Business. Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe. Tune in next week for Finding Dory with Zach Cherry. That's right. Who is not actually. Defending Ellen DeGeneres. But that's been a running bit for a year. Has it? I feel like there's been a year of texting with Zach. He's like, get ready for the Ellen defense.

3:11:03Griffin Newman:Yes. I don't really remember that, but that's, I, but as I said to you, when you floated that idea long ago, I was like, Zach Cherry Finding Nori episode? Sounds good to me. It just sounds funny. It just sounds fun. We look at the spreadsheet and we chuckle. Sounds pretty good. Sounds pretty good. Pretty good movie too. It's a movie I've seen many, many times because my daughter and I, I enjoy it. Yes. I don't like love it, but like I enjoy it. Yeah. There's fish. There's fish. Dory. There's an octopus. Octopus. He's a septopus. He's a septopus.

3:11:36David Sims:Tune in next week for that. Yep. And as always, Barsoom.

3:11:48David Sims:I love the sound of that pour.

3:11:50Griffin Newman:It would be bad if it was like plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop.

3:11:53David Sims:If it was thick. Clunk, clunk. This is like a Ben and Jerry's coffee, David. It's got a lot of objects. mix it mix it mix it chunky oh oh there was a tagline wow okay let me do the tagline i think i think in fact that's probably your best bet could do a couple things thank you it's a potent a potent aroma it's a potent mix that is a potent mix

3:12:23Griffin Newman:blank check with griffin and david is hosted by griffin newman and david sims Our executive producer is me, Ben Hosley Our creative producer is Marie Barty Salinas And our associate producer is AJ McKeon This show is mixed and edited by AJ McKeon and Alan Smithy Research by J.J. Birch Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in The Great American Novel With additional music by Alex Mitchell Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ollie Moss, and Pat Reynolds Our production assistant is Minnick Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help. Head over to BlankCheckPod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit.

3:13:02Griffin Newman:Join our Patreon, Blank Check Special Features, for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. Follow us on social at BlankCheckPod. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook, on Substack. This podcast is created and produced by Blank Check Productions.