12 Supposedly Unfilmable Films That Actually Got Made

3. John Carter (2012)

Why It Was 'Unfilmable': Edgar Rice Burroughs' series of Barsoom novels, featuring a character named John Carter transported from Civil War-era America to a Martian land of warring aliens, first caught the interest of filmmakers in 1931. But the film just wouldn't get made, for decades proving elusive to a host of moviemakers (among them John McTiernan, Robert Rodriguez and Jon Favreau). In the mean time, the John Carter of Mars books had inspired everything in science fiction cinema from Star Wars to Avatar. By the time the technology had arrived to finally make the film a reality, making a John Carter of Mars movie probably just seemed a bit pointless. How It Got Made: A John Carter movie seemed pointless, but apparently no one told that to eventual director Andrew Stanton or production studio Disney. Did John Carter see the light of day in 2012 because it was a way of finally getting the project off the Disney books? Or was John Carter simply the apotheosis of the Disney mismanagement that also led to the similarly ill-advised Mars Needs Moms and The Lone Ranger? Up until Stanton was allowed to sink a ballooned $250 million budget into his version of John Carter, other studios had for 80 years been rightly cautious of the project. As John Carter's marketing was botched and the film eventually bombed, it all just seemed like the folly of a studio that wasn't entirely sure what it was doing.