Disney has been under plenty of scrutiny with its marketing campaign for the upcoming “John Carter,” a potential science-fiction fiction franchise or a potential $250 million flop. After changing the title from “John Carter of Mars” to simply “John Carter,” the studio has had trouble positioning the Mars-set action fantasy. So how would the film’s star, Taylor Kitsch, do things differently if the marketing were up to him?
“You’re going to kill me, man. You’re killing me,” he tells Metro with a laugh when asked how he would market the film. “Um, the actor in me would go a lot darker. The earlier stuff, I loved, and I would love to see a bit of that John Carter as well — the more dramatic stuff, the Civil War John Carter.” (The film begins with Carter as a widowed and disillusioned Civil War veteran searching for gold in the Southwest.) “You don’t see literally any, really. Him on a horse, maybe, or him waking up from Mars with the beard, maybe,” Kitsch continues. “I think maybe I’d put a bit more of that in there. It just grounds it more, you know what I mean? Rather than people trying to really decipher Mars and this and that and really break it down.”
Kitsch admits being the face of a potential blockbuster but having no control over the marketing can be unnerving. “I don’t have control over it,” he says. “I mean, I just can’t wear so many hats. I mean, I’m so on the inside — obviously, being him — but there’s things, yeah, that I would love to have seen different. There’s also things that they’ve done that have opened my eyes to it in a different way. So, I mean, I really don’t have power on it at the end of the day.”
