Pixar looks to be going forward with another a sequel to one of their classic animated features. This time it is a follow up to Finding Nemo.

Deadline is reporting that the original Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton has come up with a sequel idea and the studio likes it enough to start active development on it. Of course, Pixar declined to comment on the report.

So how should we view this development? Is Stanton making a retreat back to animation after the critical and box office drubbing that his live action feature film debut John Carter took earlier this year? Probably not, as Deadline is also reporting that Disney is still looking for another project for Stanton. Are they considering what happened with John Carter a one-off fluke on a winning track record that goes back all the way to the first Toy Story animated film? Or is it their way of apologizing for screwing up the marketing on the film?

1. Katy Perry: Part Of Me (Opened Yesterday, Paramount, 2,730 Theaters, 95 Minutes, Rated PG):I have to admit, I am a fan of Katy Perry. This is an embarrassing fact to admit because A) I am not a tween and B) I am not a girl. And I am not a fan of hers because of her obviously attractive physical attributes, I am a fan of her music. She is a rarity in today’s music scene–a pop songstress that writes her own music and manages to have her songs be both catchy and unique. “I Kissed a Girl” doesn’t sound like “E.T.” which doesn’t sound like “Part of Me.”

This would be enough to build a documentary/concert film around, but Perry’s rise to fame is an interesting story all in its own. Starting as a gospel musician named Katy Hudson and going through one name change, several genre shifts,and being dropped by no less than three record labels in the nine years before her “overnight success,” the pot holes on her road to fame would have disabled many a less determined person.

So, this might be a cut above the typical film of this type. And it’s in 3D, so those remarkable physical attributes will come popping right out at you.

2. Savages (Universal, 2,627 Theaters, 130 Minutes, Rated R): Do you get the feeling that Taylor Kitsch is cursed. In January, 2012 appeared to be a big year for him, as he was set to star in three major releases. However, John Carter was such a big disappointment that people were tripping over themselves calling it a flop, Battleship, while a success overseas, wasn’t the Transformers level hit that Hasbro expected. And now this film, which had a lot of buzz going for it, will likely be trounced at the box office by Spider-Man, Katy Perry and a talking stuffed bear.

The film centers on a pair of pot dealers (Kitsch and Aaron Johnson) who won’t play ball when a Mexican cartel muscles in on their territory. The war of wills gets nasty when their girlfriend (Blake Lively) gets kidnapped. The film was co-written and directed by Oliver Stone and also stars John Travolta and Benicio Del Toro.

Maybe the film will get lucky. Maybe a bunch of confused pre-teens will see Salma Hayek’s picture on the poster and think its the Katy Perry movie. After all, they have the same wig, only a different color.

Media cynics were calling it a failure from the time its first reel unspooled. But with another $2 million domestically and a strong showing overseas, John Carter has now grossed $254,510,000 worldwide in four weeks, $4,510,000 over its estimated $250 million production budget.

A $4 million profit doesn’t seem like anything to shout about, especially if you, like most of the naysayers are now doing, choose to add its advertising budget of approximately $100 million to the total hurdle the film needs to cover come (Personally, I choose not to because A) every film has an advertising budget and that cost should be considered an institutional expense, and B) when the critics like a film and promote it as a box office success, they never include the advertising then, making its inclusion here seem like dirty pool). However, the film is coming of two weeks of a strong showing in China (where it was the number one film two weeks running to the tune of another $30 million) and its set to open in Japan, another country that likes its 3-D blockbusters, on April 13th. Which means that profit will only go up.

Of course, the naysayers are still saying nay. Box Office Mojo points out that the film’s overseas grosses ”plummeted” 72% to $6.2 million this past weekend. That number seems quite dubious since the films grosses in Mainland China has averaged $14 million per weekend for the two prior weeks, and actually made more on its second weekend than its first. To have drop off that left the grosses as just a fraction of that total seems unrealistic.

Regardless, if we need any more proof of the true popularity of the film, we have to look no farther than Amazon.com. Amazon shoppers who signed up for e-mails to alert them of DVD & Blu-Ray new releases were informed that they were able to pre-order John Carter on video today. As of this writing, the Blu-Ray 3-D/Blu-Ray/DVD/Digital Copy was the #1 selling item in Amazon’s Science-Fiction Movie list, and ranked #2 in the Action & Adventure and Fantasy Categories , behind the Game of Thrones Season One box set. It ranks #13 over all in the Movies & TV Blu-Ray list. So someone obviously wants to see it.

1. The Hunger Games (Lionsgate, 4,137 Theaters, 142 Minutes, Rated PG-13): Harry Potter is gone, Twilight is on its last legs, and we are still looking for a literary adaptation to take their place. The Chronicles of Narnia series has been somewhat popular, but the cinematic battlefield is littered with high-priced kid-lit adaptations that failed to capture audiences’ attentions the way those two did. This week, another contender steps up to the plate.

The Hunger Games is an insanely popular book trilogy that has found a number of loyal fans who have apparently never read the Japanese novel Battle Royale. Because that novel bears an almost legally actionable similarity to The Hunger Games and it came out almost 9 years earlier.

But, regardless, derivative or not, people are expecting this film to be a Potter/Twilight level success. But it is a story about kids being forced to kill kids. That lacks the sense of awe and wonder the Potter series had (although this property has a similar “coochie-coochie-coo” naming system for its characters that Rowling employed for her books) and it misses the romance of the Twilight series, two things that brought the uninitated into those franchises. Also, it is one looong film. It’s budget is lower than John Carter, but I think it might just be as big a disappointment. I could be wrong.

Heidi MacDonald over at The Beat has a fairly good rundown of rampant, joyous, near-orgasmic display of schadenfreude the film media is exhibiting over John Carter this morning. They are attacking the film like a bunch of vultures, calling it a “flop,” a “bomb,” and  even, GASP, an “Ishtar on Mars.”  She pulls quotes from Nikki Finke at Deadline, Brooks Barnes at the New York Times, Amy Kaufman at the Los Angeles Times, and others who are all doing a happy dance after being proven right in predicting that the Andrew Stanton helmed-flick would be a massive flop at the box office.

But, one problem, what if John Carter turns out not to be a flop? Granted, it ONLY made $30.6 million domestically and ONLY opened in second place this past weekend, behind The Lorax, a movie that opened the week before. But this doesn’t mean that the film will not make its $250 million budget back.

What? I’m talking crazy? How can I say that John Carter might be a success? Every other film journalist is saying the film is a failure, so that must obviously be the case, right?

Not necessarily. Allow me to present a comparison to argue my case. Let me compare John Carter with another live action film directed by a Pixar-alum, Brad Bird’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

Now, John Carter has some advantages of MI:GP. It opened in 51 foreign markets to the latter’s 42 markets and opened in about 300 more theaters domestically as well. And MI:GP opened over the crowded Christmas holiday weekend, with competition from films such as The Adventures of Tintin, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and War Horse.

However, MI:GP has more advantages than that over John Carter. It was a highly anticipated sequel to a long standing franchise. It starred one of the biggest international stars of all time, Tom Cruise, leading an international cast. And the foreign markets it did open in included Moscow, Dubai, and Mumbai, all of which were used as shooting locations in the film. MI:GP was a veritable Dagwood sandwich of built-in audience, something that John Carter never had.

Taking that into consideration, MI:GP‘s opening weekend, both here and abroad, should swamp John Carter‘s right?  Wrong. Based on Friday to Sunday weekend grosses, they were about even.

MI:GP grossed $29,556,629 from December 23 to 25th, less than JC‘s $30,603,000 this Friday to Sunday. Overseas during its opening weekend, MI:GP grossed $69.5 Million compared to JC‘s $70.6 Million. Even with the discrepancies in theater counts and foreign markets, it’s pretty safe to say that the two films are just about even. But nobody ever took joy in deeming MI:GP a flop or a failure. No one wrote that film off as another Ishtar.

And the kicker? MI:GP‘s gross-to-date is a $688,784,000 combined foreign and domestic. if JC keeps on the same pace, that will mean it more than doubled the film’s $250 million budget. That, my friends, will make it a hit. Maybe not as big a hit in a cost-to-return ratio as the $145 million budgeted MI:GP, but a hit nonetheless.

But the know-it-all’s in the press really don’t want that to happen. I believe that’s why they were so in a rush to declare the film dead on arrival after a weekend where it made 40% of its budget back. Because if they declare the film a flop, people who read their columns and blogs will believe them, figure “why bother?’ and ignore the film. Then their premature damnation will become the truth.

I don’t really know if that will work this time, because the film has been getting extraordinarily good word of mouth from people who have seen it. It garnered a B+ Cinemascore rating from theatergoers. People who believed the negative, pre-release hype are surprised by how good the film was, and people who skipped the film because of the bad press are being swayed to see it. The film doesn’t really have that far to go to make a profit. I believe this might be a case of the media’s report of the film’s demise to be greatly exaggerated.

Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars series of novels have thrilled readers for a century. And although it has taken until now for those books to make the transition to big screen it hasn’t been for a lack of trying. And while the complexity of bringing to the screen such fantastic creatures as the four-armed Martian tharks and eight-legged thoats has only been achievable in the last couple of years thanks to advances in CG technology, the very first attempt to mount a cinematic version of John Carter actually dates back to the 1930s.

The person spearheading this early attempt was animator Bob Clampett. Hired onto the Harman-Ising Studio at Warner Brothers in 1931 following his high school graduation, Clampett was slowly learning the art of animation and trying to work his way up the cartoon studio ladder. Feeling that the chances for upwards mobility were limited at Warners, Clampett decided that he should develop his own projects independently. Realizing that there could be more to animation than just the cute animals that made up his work on the Merrie Melodie shorts he was doing at Warners, Clampett approached Burroughs in 1936 with the idea of bringing John Carter and his adventures on Barsoom, as the red planet is called by its inhabitants, to the big screen via animation.

To his credit, Burroughs immediately gleamed on to the idea, recognizing that no special effects budget could limit what an animator could draw. He gave Clampett permission to begin developing a series of cartoons that would not be strict adaptations of the books but would take the cast of characters and place them in new adventures. Joining Clampett on the project was Burroughs’ son John Coleman Burroughs. Recently graduated from college, John helped to develop the look of his father’s world by sculpting models of many of Barsoom’s inhabitants.

Clampett’s idea was for a series of nine-minute long shorts, each one telling a complete story. Clampett worked nights and weekends on the test footage, even enlisting fellow Warner Brothers animators Chuck Jones and Robert Cannon to lend an occasional hand. The finished test reel was shown to various studios and MGM expressed initially interest but backed down when their sales representatives in the south and mid-westreported that theater owners were more interested in more Tarzan than they were in a possible John Carter of Mars animated series so the idea died. It wouldn’t be until 1941 when the Fleischer Studio’s first Superman cartoon would arrive in theaters showing that animation could indeed stretch beyond the boundaries it was currently confined within.

The footage below appears to be all that is left of however much material Clampett may have generated for the project. There’s also a voice over from Clampett from what I am presuming is a public appearance later in life where he talks about the approaches he used in creating these tests. At just about two minutes in length, the footage gives us a tantalizing glimpse at a series of cartoons that could have changed how animation was used to tell stories.

Of course, Clampett would go on to make a number of other impactful and lasting contributions to the art of animation. But a potential movie version of John Carter would bounce around Hollywood for several decades. Special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen was approached in the mid-1950s to work on a version but he declined, feeling that the script wasn’t strong enough. In 1986, Disney would launch an attempt that saw a number of screenwriters, including a pre-Pirates Of The Caribbean Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio,  and Back To The Future‘s Bob Gale and director John McTiernan working on it before letting the rights lapse in 2002. Paramount promptly snatched them up and had Robert Rodriguez, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow‘s Kerry Conran and Jon Favreau all working on it before the studio decided not to renew their option on the rights in 2006. Disney snatched the rights back up and the reslut is now in theaters.

If there are moments in John Carter where you feel a twinge of deja vu, don’t be surprised. The original pulp novels by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs that the new Disney film is based on have served as inspiration for writers, comic book creators and filmmakers for a century, so there is bound to be somethings that will look or feel familiar. But director Andrew Stanton’s sprawling epic spectacularly shows us that sometimes there can be no substitute for the original.

John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) is a disillusioned former Confederate soldier who has moved out to the American west to be alone. Fleeing conscription by the US Cavalry and some rather irate Apaches, Carter stumbles across a mysterious from which he is transported to Mars or as its inhabitants call it, Barsoom. There he encounters the four-armed, green-skinned tharks led by Tars Tarks (William DeFoe) and finds himself rescuing the lovely and humanoid Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), a princess from one of two warring cities. Carter is drawn into the conflict only to discover that it is secretly being manged by a mysterious group of clerics (led by Mark Strong, is making a career out of epic science-fiction villains). Carter must find a way to defeat them and bring peace to Barsoom before the clerics turn their attention towards Earth.

There is plenty spectacle on display here and it isn’t just a series of action sequences for the sake of having action sequences. Stanton gives them each their own emotional weight, allowing us to become invested in their outcome for the sake of how it will affect the characters rather than  just the prurient interest of visually cool, but ultimately vacuous visual effects porn.

For one fight sequence in the middle of the film Stanton intercuts between Carter fearlessly facing off against an army of tharks armed only with a sword and flashbacks to Carter’s life with his wife and child and him tragically finding them dead after their frontier home was burned to the ground by Union soldiers. The fight becomes more than just another action beat in the plot but a pivotal moment for the character, providing him with the emotional closure he needs for his old life in order to embrace his new life on Mars.

Much like Peter Jackson brought J. R. R. Tolkien’s detailed Middle Earth to life in his Lord Of The Rings films, Stanton has plumbed the depths of Burroughs’ novels to bring Barsoom to cinematic reality. He presents a world that has long been in decline, where complex flying machines are manned by sword-wielding soldiers and where scientific study appears to be pursued in ways that recall the monks of the middle ages.

If the film suffers at all, it is right at its center. While Stanton does some good work in delineating Carter’s character, it turns out that for a good chunk of the movie, he is not the most likeable hero for much of that time. Sure, he swings into action to save Dejah Toris a number of times but he does so with a grim expression and a certain reluctance that makes it hard to root for. We need our pulp heroes to embrace their heroics, to be swashbuckling with a smile on their face and we don’t really get that until close to the end of the film. At least if we get a sequel we know that this won’t continue to be a problem.

1. John Carter (Disney, 3,749 Theaters, 132 Minutes, Rated PG-13): Schadenfreude is the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. I don’t know if a movie can qualify as one of those “others,” but if it can, then this film is a shining example of the term in action. There’s a lot of pre-schadenfreude going on here. A lot of people are actively rooting for this film to fail.

To be fair, the film is calling a lot of the schadenfreude upon itself. It is a $250 million dollar film based on a character celebrating his 100th birthday this year. It has a writer/director with no live-action film experience, an unproven lead, and it’s a sword-and-sorcery concept melded with science-fiction that doesn’t usually set the world on fire.

However, that writer/director is Andrew Stanton, who has two, count’em, two Oscars for his work at Pixar (for Wall*E and Finding Nemo) and four other Oscar nominations.  That unproven lead is Taylor Kitsch, an actor who is playing a lead or co-lead in three huge pictures this year (this one, Battleship in May, and Savages in July), so it’s not that Hollywood doesn’t have faith in him. And that character and concept was created by Edgar Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan fame) who has lasted this long by building generation after generation of fans.

I’m typically negative here, but I’ll tell you what–I’m pulling for this film. I’m rooting for it. I hope it’s great and it pulls the audiences in. Try anti-schadenfreude sometime. It’s fun.

2. Silent House (Open Road Films, 2,124 Theaters, 85 Minutes, Rated R): For a horror film, this one has a lot going for it. It has Elizabeth Olsen, who probably should have gotten an Oscar nomination last year for her work in Martha Marcy May Marlene. And the film was shot as one continuous take–no editing. That is a great technical accomplishment.

However, it is a horror/suspense film. So, not being edited might not be the best thing for the film. You can build a lot of tension with a jump cut here and there. And the plot–a young women is sent to close up her familiy’s lakeside retreat, but while she is there, evil things starts to happen, would be totally conventional if it wasn’t for the continuous shot gimmick.

Who knows? The gimmick might work. But it might not.

3. A Thousand Words (Paramount/Dreamworks, 1,890 Theaters, 91 Minutes, Rated PG-13): Remember a couple months ago, when Tower Heist came out? You couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting some article stating that Eddie Murphy was back to his raunchy comedy film self. Those writers should have held off on publishing those articles until this film came out, because it has more in common with The Nutty Professor than 48 Hours or Trading Places.

Murphy plays a man who screws over a guru and becomes cursed. Whenever he says a word, a leaf falls off a tree in his yard. When the last leaf falls, he dies. The rest of the film involves him trying to make amends as quietly as he can so he can save his own life.

Doesn’t seem as bad as some of Murphy’s worst movies, but that’s not saying much.

With just a few days until it hits theaters, Disney has released a new ten minute clip from their space fantasy epic John Carter, but don’t expect to see any of the film’s fantastic set pieces set on Mars.

The segment is from early in the film in the Old West before our titular hero (Taylor Mayne) gets transported to Mars, which begs the question why is this the clip that they released? The bulk of the film’s story is set on the red planet and there are plenty of amazing sequences that they could have released to play that up. They’ve already done that recently when they released an action-packed sequence of Carter fighting a paid of giant martian white apes in a gladiatorial arena.

I’m not sure what the backpedal here is, but it just represents the latest in what I’ve come to feel is some very uneven and even confusing marketing from Disney. Let’s hope that it doesn’t have too much of a negative impact on the film’s box office.

Disney has just under a week and a half to go to get people interested in seeing John Carter, their $250 epic adaption of the Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp hero. This latest trailer ramps up the excitement factor that t he movie contains, and between this and the television ads that just started running featuring positive pull quotes, I wish Disney had been doing this for the last few weeks.  This trailer spells out so much more what the film is about and I hope that there is enough time for it to sink in and excite potential ticket buyers.