2. John Carter
I know, I know, no-ones going to be touching the bones of this colossal, misfiring travesty for a long while yet, and it now effectively acts as a cautionary tale for all would-be-blockbusters. But the fact that Disneys first run at Edgar Rice Borroughs material one of the patient zeroes of modern sci-fi proved to be disastrous shouldnt deter anyone from trying again. And if the collapse of this film has shown anything, its shown that its probably be easy to bring back Taylor Kitsch, whose career appears to be stalling and looks in desperate need of any high-profile work that is, if he wants to risk it again, a pretty formidable question. The problem with John Carter was that it took a shotgun-to-a-dartboard approach attempting to make something stick, it threw a couple of Borroughs stories into the plot and considering most of his mythos is pretty out-there to begin with, it confused people very quickly. Combine this with the surreal twist at the end concerning Carter coming back to aid a younger incarnation of his author, and you had a recipe for disaster. A potential reboot needs to avoid this if it can let the source material breathe without deviating too far from the original, it might just stand a better chance of success. Of course, theres always a question of the epic scale which dragged the films profits down while it might seem a contradiction to what Ive said above, it might be a good idea to eschew a reasonable amount the huge, trippy visuals and focus on the characters. Maybe Im in a minority here, but I dont think John Carter was a
bad character, he was just a little vanilla. Making everything more character-centric might be a good idea, plot-wise, and it would free up a great chunk of the budget which would otherwise be used on special effects, such as Kitsch prancing around on the surface of Mars. Plus, wed get more interactions with Lynn Collins Dejah Thoris, who was probably the high point of that film.