John Carter was initially supposed to be a movie trilogy, but the sequels never happened — here is everything we know about John Carter 2 and 3's unrealized story plans. With Toy Story's Andrew Stanton at its helm, Disney's John Carter movie adapts Edgar Rice Burroughs' pulpy sci-fi novel, A Princess of Mars. The movie does an incredible job at building a rich, mythology-fueled interstellar world where a brooding cosmic conflict becomes the backdrop of romantic developments and promising CGI-fueled action scenes. Considering that it has all the markings of a potential franchise, it is not surprising that director Andrew Stanton wanted to move it forward as a full-fledged fantasy movie series.
John Carter centers on a titular Civil War veteran who mysteriously finds himself on Mars. As he explores the planet's desolate surface, he soon comes across strange fantastical creatures and also learns that he possesses the ability to defy Mars' gravity and make giant leaps in the air. This newfound ability comes in handy when Carter (played by Taylor Kitsch of the Friday Night Lights fame) gets embroiled in a brewing war on the planet and fights evil to become a hero.
The original Edgar Rice novels offer an abundance of source material content for at least two more sequels, and the movie also ends with an intriguing Avatar-esque cliffhanger that sets up the stage for another Mars adventure. Unfortunately, although Andrew Stanton did have a trilogy in mind when he first directed John Carter, the follow-ups never saw the light of the day because of a series of marketing decisions and unfortunate affairs that followed the film's release. Owing to its underwhelming box office performance despite its potential scalability, it is hard not to wonder what went wrong with Disney's John Carter.
As Andrew Stanton revealed (via Collider), John Carter 2 would have been titled Gods of Mars. Just like Willem Dafoe's Tars in the first film, Lynn Collins' Dejah would have narrated the prologue of the second one. The movie's story begins with her reciting the events of the first film to her child, Carthoris, who she believes will never know his father John Carter. Soon after, Ciarán Hinds’ Tardos Mors takes the child from her while assuring her that he will put him to bed. However, he turns out to be Matai Shang (played by Kingsman's Mark Strong) in one of his shapeshifting forms, who kidnaps the child and disappears. With this, the movie's opening credits start rolling, and it begins where the first film ended — John Carter's return to the planet of Barsoom.
Arriving after a decade since his departure, Carter learns that Dejah has gone down the river, hoping that it will lead her to their abducted child. After joining forces with Tars Tarkas, Carter follows his wife's lead and soon discovers a modern underground city that is ruled by the Firstborn race. It turns out that the Firstborns are devotees of Goddess Isis and have been managing everything from water to air - food to plants - on the planet since its inception. Realizing that Goddess Isis is another one of shapeshifting Matai's fake identities, Carter sets out to expose him to the Firstborns and rescue his son. John Carter 2's story reaches its crescendo when Carter almost kills his own son, who has been genetically advanced by Matai into an adult superhuman warrior. In the end, Dejah, Carter, and their son finally reunite, and the three races — the Red, the Green, and the Firstborn — come together to overpower the Therns.
John Carter 3, titled Warlord of Mars, follows Carter's race against time to find the Therns who want to demolish the entire planet. To buy time, the Therns use their shapeshifting abilities to pose as leaders of Martian races and manipulate them into fighting one another. Meanwhile, Dejah invents a device to detect the Therns in their shapeshifting disguises, but the Therns stay one step ahead and destroy her device. Soon after, they also kill Taylor Kitsch's John Carter, but little do they realize he is only a copy of the original Carter who wakes up on Earth.
Back on Earth, Edgar uses his shotgun to save Carter from Thern Pinkertons and helps him return to Mars. As the threat of a World War looms in the shadows, Carter and his family carry their last remaining Thern detector to the top of the world by following the Thern trial. That's when John runs into Matai and defeats him to ultimately save the planet and rightfully become the titular Warlord of Mars.
The sequels never happened because John Carter flopped at the box office. Before tax rebates and marketing costs, the movie's production budget was $307 million, which was extremely high compared to its $281 million worldwide collection (via The Wrap). Later, Walt Disney Co. even announced that it expected a loss of $200 million on the film (via LA Times), making John Carter a quintessential big-budget box office failure like Water World. After Disney lost the rights to the property in 2014, all hope for the sequels was lost and Stanton's promising ideas for the sequels remained dormant. John Carter 2 & 3's fate is unfortunate in every sense, but it also serves as a lesson on how seemingly trivial changes in a film's marketing and brand can incur substantial losses.
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