I have no proof but somewhat suspect it was intentional sabotage. I've said before, Disney's corporate structure is really prone to faction fights and power grabs between various executives, and when you see them making really obvious, really stupid mistakes that sink a project, especially when the rest of the project seems good, my first suspicion is Executive A is making a power play to screw over Executive B's project.
Let me just confirm your suspicions: the film was originally green-lit by Dick Cook, who was an avid supporter of the project. During the lengthy production, Cook was ousted and replaced by Rich Ross, who made it his mission in life to ruin every single one of Cook's still-ongoing projects.
Disney's marketing department had also just been taken over by a pretty inexperienced guy (his background was exclusively in TV, with limited budgets). The department was in relative disarray, and it didn't help that director Andrew Stanton pretty much cajoled them into accepting some of his marketing preferences. Stanton is a good director, but a margeting genius he is
not.
So, it was really malice compounded by incompetence...
The choice of titles is perplexing.
I still say they should've just gone for
John Carter and the Princess of Mars. This is the same naming formula we see in many adventure stories, e.g. Indiana Jones. Put that title there in a vaguely
art nouveau style, and have your marketing rely on the fact that this is the story that inspired all the modern-day legends eveybody knows. "From the author of Tarzan, the adventure that inspired Star Wars, Flash Gordon and Superman..."
(Yes, that bit about Superman is true. They literally came up with that while thinking "
But what if instead of an Earth-man being super-strong on Mars, what if an alien man was super-strong on Earth...?")
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Anyway, speaking in general about this cool premise: I agree very much with what
@Bear Ribs in particular has written. I would add the following notes:
1) The primary objective is to eliminate woke bullshit and the idiots who peddle it. Writing must be done by story-tellers, not by small-minded propagandists. Stories must entertain, impress or tantalise the audience, not attack, demean and accuse the audience. To this end, we'll fire a vast amount of morons, and black-list them and all their friends. Writers, actors, producers, managers... anyone who's gone "woke" will
not be on our roster. Ever.
2) Instead, we hire the best, and we hire them not just to lead, but to teach. There will be an in-house "graduate school" for writers, and you on't get to write for Disney until you graduate that programme. Then, on to an apprentice position. Further learning on the job. Basically: you don't get to write solo until you've worked for Disney for a few years, and spend those years learning from the best.
3) Rules for history works: no presentism, no race changes, no gender changes, no bullshit of that sort in any way. If you make a series set in Mediaeval England, it's going to be about white people, and that's just how it is. Conversely, if we make a series set in pre-columbian America, we cast Native American actors and nobody else. Epics set in Ancient China won't feature Matt fucking Damon, either...
4) Rules for adaptations are much the same: we keep it as it is. If something really doesn't work nowadays (e.g. because the original was set in the '50s) we can tweak that,
or we deliberately make it retro and set in the past. But there won't be race changes, gender changes or any other unwarranted alterations to any pre-existing character. You want to add a black character to a series? Great. Make one. Don't put a black "skin-suit" on an already exiting white character, because that's not only lazy, it's demeaning. It suggests blacks can only be interesting in roles made by and for whites. That's some low-bar bullshit and I resent it.
5) On that note: every single ongoing project that does feature any "woke" changes gets
cancelled. Immediately. We'll consider re-booting it in two years.
6) I support the notion of a
Witches of Karres series/trilogy/whatever. Man, I love that book.
7) In addition, rather than trying stories eminently unsuitable for Disney... if we're going with Heinlein, I'd focus on his juveniles. Adventure stories that young people can enjoy. Turn that into a bunch of animated series, and you've got a winning formula.
8) One other Heinlein story I'd really like to do is
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as a high-budhet one-season (mini-)series. No adaptaion bullshit, no "subverting the message". Anarchist libertarian revolution on the moon, with the revolutionaries depicted sympathetically and the government unsympathetically. (And we keep the tragic ending, with the new lunar government quickly becoming just as bad, and the hero going to seek a new frontier in the asteroid belt. This deliberately echoes the aftermath of the American revolution, and call of the frontier to liberty-minded people...)
9) Another project we're definitely doing:
Tschai, Planet of Adventure. Either as a series of films, or as a high-budget series. It's the perfect sci-fi adventure story, you can't go wrong with this if you just resist the urge to "change" things.
10) And we'll be doing a bunch of history mini-series, kind of in the vein of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, but not cenred on Indy, and less fixed in the limited period of that series. Think of a mini-series about the Barbary Wars, for instance. Stuff like that. Adventure against the backdrop of various historical events, with a considerable amount of (latent, not that in-your-face) educational value. Great for young people to watch.
11) This is important: we return to
traditional animation. The googly-eyed 3D bullshit stops NOW.
12) No anime. No weeaboo shit, ever. It's fine if others do it, but we don't. Disney represents the tradition of
Western animation.
...Other than that, I'll just leave it to qualified writers to pitch good ideas. Once the first two years are up and we can reconsider stuff Disney previously handled, we'll see about re-visiting some good stuff. Particularly, I think we should do the John Carter thing as a traditional Disney animated film, particularly adapting the first three books in this way.
And then, of course, there is
Star Wars. We cancel everything on-going, and we de-canonise the entire "new continuity". None of it gets salvaged, it's just completely scrapped. It's literally relegated to just being the most expansive of the non-canonical "Infinities". No new works set in this continuity will get made ever again. For all intents and purposes, Rey et al. just cease to exist and will never be heard from again.
I'm not restoring the entire EU, because it's got quite a few turds. I don't like the Denningverse, but for the sake of those who do, I'll hire Christie Golden to write her
Sword of the Jedi books after all. This will be aimed at providing a stepping stone to the future seen in the Legacy comics. This then completes that continuity, which includes all of the old EU prior to the Disney purchase of LucasFilm.
As far as "official" continuity is concerned, it'll basically be the old EU, but excluding the NJO series and everything after it chronologically, excluding
The Clone Wars and anything directly tied to it, and also excluding a lot of the sillier odds and ends of the EU (like Jedi Prince books and stuff like that). Furthermore, we'll be turning a lot of it into high-budget series and films, some live-action and some animated. We're going to start with
Tales of the Jedi, then
Knights of the Old Republic, then
Knight Errant, then the
Darth Bane trilogy... you're getting the gist of it, no doubt. These new on-screen versions will be the official continuity, and whatever we don't adapt for th screen, we re-publish as tie-ins (in some cases perhaps a bit polished up, because the writing in the EU could be pretty uneven). We'll stay away from the OT era for now.
We're also going to put a vast load of money into a high-quality restoration of the original trilogy. Basically the despecialised edition, but with a huge budget to get the absolute best quality possible. We'll invite all of the major fan-editors who worked on this kind of thing to share their experience for this project, for which they'll receive both pay and credit. The restored versions will be the original, non-specialised version, but with production errors digitally corrected. A separate version will be released that includes
some of the special edition alterations (particularly the actually justified stuff, like the Cloud City window views), but none of the uneccesary and intrusive stuff. The deleted scenes will also be digitally restored as a bonus feature.
Oh, and we'll release more Infinities as comics. For instance, George Lucas's ideas for the sequel trilogy will be adapted into a limited series, much like
The Star Wars.
