10 Big-Budget Movies That Were Doomed From The Start

10. John Carter

John Carter is by no means a terrible movie. It features plenty of ambitious world-building, some fantastic visuals, a decent score and a couple of strong action sequences. However, the entire endeavor just seemed destined to fail from the minute is was announced.

It appeared as though Andrew Stanton had bitten off far more than he could chew for his first foray into live-action filmmaking. It takes a confident person to dive in at the deep end on a $263m effects-heavy Disney blockbuster and while the director did his best, a number of factors severely harmed John Carter's chances of success.

Neither Stanton, Disney chairman Rich Ross or the production and marketing teams had much experience in the way of managing and controlling mega-budget productions, and it showed. In the wake of the Mars Needs Moms debacle the previous year, the movie was blandly re-titled as plain old John Carter, which told casual audiences absolutely nothing about the content.

The marketing campaign cost over $100m but was incredibly poor, and made the project look like Derivative Sci-Fi Movie No. 317, and failed to play up the significance of Edgar Rice Burroughs' source material had on the genre itself. To the surprise of virtually nobody, John Carter tanked at the box office.

Despite just about scraping back its budget, the project ended up losing an eye-watering $200m for Disney, directly led to Rich Ross' resignation and virtually killed Stanton's hopes of a live-action career, sending him back to Pixar with his tail between his legs.