The movie ‘John Carter’ hasn’t even been out yet and writer/director Andrew Stanton is already planning on the sequels.
At a London press junket to show clips from the movie ‘John Carter’, Stanton revealed that it was his plan all along to make a trilogy:
“We bought the rights to the first three books when we first started. I thought, let’s set it off right because you never get time back. The worst case scenario is that you’ll plan for more but only make one. But what I’d hate is that you’d plan for one with no preparation for the others, because it’ll show. It’ll really bite you in the back end.
So if the worst is that it was just a writing exercise for me to plan the others and then I never get to do them, I don’t think I’ll have any regrets. So we’ve been planning out all three all along, just on the chance that they do go ahead.”
If Stanton has his way, there would be more than just 3 movies. “My fan wish,” he states, “is that we’ll go to all eleven stories and make more.”
It’s not uncommon to start working on a sequel of a movie before it even comes out. If you recall, Lionsgate has been courting Simon Beaufoy (‘Slumdog Millionaire’, ‘127 hours’) to write the sequel to ‘The Hunger Games’ before its release in March. But with a budget of a quarter of a billion dollars, word has it that ‘John Carter’ would have to be extremely successful to warrant a sequel…about $700 million worth of success. But Stanton seems to be aware of all this:
“I never expected anyone to say we’d definitely do more than one. It’s a huge risk for them… and it’s a huge chunk of change to make any of these movies, something this big. So it made complete sense to me, from their side of the fence, to wait until the movie is out.”
So do you think Stanton will get the go ahead from the studios to make the sequels? And if he does, what do you hope to see in them?
‘John Carter’ will be in theaters March 9, 2012 and just in case you missed it the first time around, here is the trailer.
