One hundred years after its original serialization in The All-Story magazine, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulp classic A Princess of Mars found itself in an incredibly strange position when the film adaptation finally reached movie theatres. The movie was saddled with a terrible, bland title that makes sense only to people who’d read the book and a marketing campaign that utterly failed to stir viewers’ interests. According to Hollywood lore, the director, Andrew Stanton, thought that the character John Carter was much better known than it turned out he was, and also that teen males wouldn’t want to go see a movie called “A Princess of Mars” (which, for the record, was a really stupid idea). In addition to this bungling, the book’s storyline had been so influential since its publication, referenced by dozens of works like Flash Gordon, Dune, Star Wars and, most recently, 2009’s Avatar, that the audiences who actually did end up seeing it must have thought they were being ripped off.

Full Article at The Pulp Press