10 Terrible Mars Movies That Don't Bode Well For The Martian

Rotten Tomatoes score: 51%

Box Office: $284.1 million ($263.7 million budget)

The biggest flop of Disney's attempts to make their own Star Wars, before the studio decided "screw this, let's just buy the real thing" (and then managed to make a hugely entertaining space opera of their own anyway with Guardians Of The Galaxy), John Carter's producers were so concerned about the historic failure of Mars films that they removed all reference to the Red Planet from the movie's title.

This meant that the evocative A Princess Of Mars (the studio's also not big on using 'Princess' in its titles anymore, witness Tangled and Frozen) became John Carter, which sounds like a film about an insurance adjuster. Its bland Mars-free marketing campaign isn't the only reason it flopped, but it certainly didn't help, and, when you factor in the cost of marketing, the movie ended up a pretty big loss maker.

Actually better structured than the similar Avatar and with some great design work, John Carter ironically just felt too derivative of the works that Edgar Rice Burrough's novel had inspired down the years to succeed.