If I remember correctly Disney lost a lot of money on that movie. I liked it though.
It is explained in the link, but to summarize: The director wanted to name it John Carter of Mars because yes, that it would make more sense to name it after the main character for movie audiences. Then some dumbass Disney exec made them drop the ‘of Mars’ part because they didn’t like the performance of other recent movies with ‘Mars’ in the name.
The reason dropping ‘of Mars’ was stupid is because it just made it someone’s name which only works with a decent advertising campaign for a straightforward movie like John Wick.
Maybe they had to, given the barely passing resemblence to the source material.
Working out the numbers on IMDB, the estimated budget was $250,000,000. Gross worldwide: $284,139,100. Total from these numbers: $34,139,100.
The number(s) that are not represented, is how much Disney spent to market the movie. And since it was supposed to be their latest tentpole movie franchise, they must have spent the same amount they did on production (and perhaps more,) to market it. This means that Disney might have put $500 million or more into the whole project. Then they would have lost $215,860,900 or more.
yeah, it was one of those movies that I think was ruined by the advertising. All the adverts at the time tried to make it seems like a star wars rip off, when it wasn’t anything like star wars really.