Good when it's talking about the business decisions and inept marketing choices surrounding the film, less so when Sellers is talking about himself, his website and the film's supporters - could there be a sequel as some fan-made Facebook page has 10,000 likes (answer: No).

There's plenty wrong with John Carter as a film, and also Stanton's production (for example; his decision to film using the vastly more expensive film stock rather than digital, largely because it would be "cool") - none of which Sellers wants to really discuss, he's solely concerned with the marketing (or lack thereof). ( )

Highly recommended book analyzing and detailing how Disney corporate shenanigans and poor marketing doomed what could have been an incredible franchise for them.

I'll admit that my conspiracy brain thought a lot of what happened to John Carter was Disney wanting a tax write-off/shield against the earnings of the Avengers. The truth behind it was far worse--less a plan and more a confluence of crappy decisions made by people far less invested in the movie than those creatives working on it.

Do yourselves a favor and give this a read; a goodly chunk of the book is readable online at goodreads.com, so give it a try if you're unsure if this is a book you'd want to read.

Lesson to come from this--Andrew Stanton made a great movie and trusted that the audience was smarter than most marketing folks would have him believe. Alas, the same cannot be said of marketing people or movie critics (60% of whom slammed the movie for having ripped off any number of properties that actually had ripped off THIS material, not the opposite). ( )

Michael Sellers makes the best case possible for why Andrew Stanton's film of Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars stories was perceived as such a flop. It starts with inept marketing by Disney and proceeds from there. His case is convincing, but also depressing, since it boils down to the success of a modern movie depending upon social media such as Facebook and Twitter, in addition to a plethora of movie blogs and critic's sites that have sprung up on the Internet. Basically, you have to get these early influencers involved to build a buzz that carries over into the pre-release days of the film when the general public finally starts to take notice and decide what movie they might want to see. The best parts of the book, however, aren't the tiring wades through metrics from IMDB and a host of other sources, or the endless quotes from blog comments, but the author's assertion of why Edgar Rice Burroughs was a great writer and is still worth reading. If you can get through this rather long and very repetitive book, you may find yourself turning to Burroughs' novels before you watch John Carter. But if you do watch the film, like me, you'll probably be entertained, satisfied with the cast, but somewhat disappointed at the muddled plot and the fact that its hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

As another reviewer has noted, the book is full of typos and doesn't appear to have been proofread at all. ( )

This book might provide an interesting insight into the apparent failure of the movie John Carter (based of course on Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Princess of Mars" book). It lays out the many attempts to bring the book to the big screen over the years and then the massive marketing failures as the movie was released which led to the movie's financial failure. I may amend this review once I've completed reading it, if ever. However at about the one third point of the book (I'm reading on Kindle, so no page numbers...) I feel compelled to note to potential readers that this is THE MOST SLOPPILY EDITED AND PROOFREAD BOOK I HAVE EVER READ. I have not attempted to count the plethora of errors but would estimate I am seeing almost one grammar or spelling error per page. This is derailing my efforts to get thru the book. One of the most egregious was spelling McDonalds (the restaurant) as MacDonalds. Just simple sloppiness, and inexcusable in a published work (or in any writing for that matter). The book is rife with simple misuse of grammar. There are many quotes, and the number of grammar errors found within them lead me to believe that either most Hollywood-related executives don't know how to speak in proper sentences or (much more likely) the author was incapable of even transcribing such direct quotes without introducing his own lack of mastery of the English language.

That said, my background is as a longtime science fiction reader who just read Princess of Mars in the past year or so, and found it to be an enjoyable read, especially given that it was written in 1927. When I heard the movie was coincidentally coming out, I anticipated going to see it. However the lack of any real grab by the marketing (or lack thereof) and the pretty consistently negative initial reviews turned me off on seeing it in the theater. I may still watch at home some day, but am disappointed that the movie didn't do better. I am reading Gods of Hollywood not so much because I care about the movie industry, but rather to try to understand how such a good book could have been such a bust as a movie. I do believe this book attempts to do that and, again, is obviously well researched by a knowledgeable author. Too bad the author or publisher didn't feel it necessary to do some simple proofreading. My two star rating is a compromise between 4 for content and zero for mechanical quality of writing. ( )