The Los Angeles Times has a piece up looking at the panic in Hollywood over the failures of John Carter, Terra Nova, Luck, and Hugo, all projects with extremely well-connected talent attached that none the less failed to find the audiences that would make them successes—and would make them profitable. Writer Patrick Goldstein blames a lack of relatable heroes at the center of each project, and interviews blog favorite Gavin Polone, who suggests that studios just don’t have any idea what audiences like anymore. Here are five ideas for what they might learn from these particular projects:

1. Bland doesn’t mean broadly appealing: I admire Taylor Kitsch’s abs, but if you haven’t seen Friday Night Lights (and many people haven’t), it’s not clear what his hook is other than his extreme handsomeness. Is he self-deprecating-but-not-really like George Clooney? Does he have a gift for physical comedy like the one Channing Tatum surprised people with in 21 Jump Street? Similarly, Jason O’Mara on Terra Nova was perhaps the epitome of the flavorless hunks Hollywood’s tried to peddle us over the last decade. There’s just nothing to him, but they’re convinced we’ll like him anyway. Being inoffensive is not the same time as being appealing to a broad swath of viewers, and it’s time for Hollywood to stop treating leading men that way.

2. Concepts matter: I’ve beat this horse on Terra Nova a lot, but it’s really not enough to throw robot dinosaurs at us and be assured we’ll be entertained and engaged. If anything, John Carter had the opposite problem. There are a ton of good concepts to draw on there, and there simply wasn’t enough time to explore them all. The movie might have been better if it could give us a sense of the nature of the conflict between Mars’ humans, or sharped the relationship between those societies and the Tharks. Instead, it had to rush through everything. So two rules: 1) Make sure your concept is well-developed and good, and 2) Make sure it’s a match for your form.

3. Your private interests are not inherently fascinating: There are horse-racing fans who share David Milch’s intensity for the sport, but there are not many of them—it’s why the sport is in trouble. And while there are more people who care about movie history, they’re still not the majority of the movie-going audience. Hugo‘s $73 million in domestic box office may be worse considering what it cost to make, but it’s not like The Artist has lit the world on fire, either. Even after its Best Picture win, it’s only taken in $42 million. Fascinating things may emerge from creators’ private passions, but just because they feel strongly about something doesn’t mean it’s inherently going to pull in an audience to match.

4. The 3D jig is up: It may jack up ticket costs, but it’s not like we don’t notice. And it’s particularly irritating when 3D doesn’t add a single thing to a movie and gives viewers a headache along with it. 3D may be an attractive way to get your movie to the Chinese market, which is allowing more 3D and Imax American movies into its theaters, but that doesn’t mean it can replace storytelling, characterization or acting here.

5. The hero doesn’t always have to be a dude: I tend to think that Hugo’s hero should remain who it is, though Chloe Moretz’s Isabelle was delightful. But Dejah Thoris is vastly more interesting than John Carter; anyone would have been more interesting than O’Mara in the lead in Terra Nova; and watching a woman try to break into top-flight jockeying might have been more interested than David Milch’s latest foray into Dudeland.

Vulture has a blockbuster read on what went wrong in the campaign to market John Carter, and this strikes me as particularly illuminating:

Stanton (who also nixed all mentions of his Pixar work in the teaser for fear that people would think this film was for little kids) was working from the belief that John Carter was still as universally iconic a figure to people as Dracula, Luke Skywalker, or Tarzan. “It was my Harry Potter,” he said during an interview at Google last week that was streamed live on YouTube. “All I ever wanted when I read that book was to believe it.” He believed that audiences would gasp in delight at John Carter’s very appearance in much the same way that a Batman teaser might only need to flash the Bat Signal. As such, he felt that the very first John Carter trailer needed only to intrigue, not explicate. “To him, it was the most important sci-fi movie of all time,” recounts one Disney marketing insider present for the pitched battles. “He could see no idea in which someone didn’t know who John Carter of Mars was. But it’s not Frankenstein; it’s not Sherlock Holmes. Nobody cares. People don’t say, ‘I know what I’ll be for Halloween! I’ll be John Carter!’”

Carney fought strenuously with Stanton — insiders describe arguments that ended with the brash department head almost reduced to tears — and urged him to rethink this vision and tell a more personal story of the man, but he won every battle: Because of his outsized animated successes, Disney gave him final approval on everything. “They throw petals at his feet,” says our insider. And then the respectful trailer did nothing for the buzz. Adds a former Disney distribution exec, “You only get one shot at making a first impression … And that first trailer, it never jumped off, never did anything to catch that wave of anticipation that all new movies crave. That’s what so critical for a movie like this.”

Ultimately, if you want to make movies in the commercial system, with all the support systems and resources that entails, you probably have to acknowledge the basic realities of that system: among them, that not everyone in the universe feels the same way as you about your source material. It’s one thing if you’re tweaking Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to make a difficult book adaptable. It’s another if you’re absolutely deluded about the market penetration of the book you want to adapt, and of what parts of it will seem fresh and powerful to your audience. I absolutely support the idea that we should have greater innovation in commercial film. But there’s a difference between that and belittling the people around you who are trying to make your movie a success and maximizing the financial risk your employer is taking on you in pursuit of a private vision you’re not willing to examine with any sort of clarity.

John Carter, Disney’s hugely expensive Mars epic and the live-action directing debut from Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, arrives in theaters today burdened with huge expectations. The movie is overstuffed with everything from gothic inheritance tales, to alien corporate raiders, to scientific breakthroughs, to Civil War PTSD. But it says a great deal about John Carter that the movie’s at its best when most of those elements are off-screen, and when our titular hero’s doing an awkward ballet as he learns to walk in Martian gravity, or as he reckons with the dog-like alien who’s decided to adopt him.

While it isn’t a major part of the movie, a clear symptom of John Carter‘s larger problems is the way in handles the trope, of the sympathetic—and innocent—Confederate. Carter was a Confederate in the original source material, and he’s presented here through a common narrative: a man comes home from a war in which he was a disinterested participant to find his home destroyed and his wife and child dead. It’s true that there were non-slave holding whites who fought for the Confederacy (and on the Union side, the response to the law that allowed wealthy men to pay substitutes to fight for them gave rise to the saying “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.”). But there’s something unattractive about a narrative that paints men who fought to uphold slavery and white supremacy, even if they were only doing it for the paycheck, as victims without any sort of engagement of the cause for which they fought.

On Mars, Carter’s decision to become a different man largely consists of deciding it’s all right for him to love Martian princess Dejah Thoris. His championing of the Tharks, the aliens who first find him and adopt him into their tribe, who aren’t exactly an analogue for American slaves (the humans on Mars seem to ignore them or form loose alliances with them, rather than oppressing them) is less a matter of political awakening than the most convenient way for him to stop Dejah’s wedding the evil Sab Than, who has been attacking her city. Early in his acquaintance with them, Sola, a female Thark, takes the brand that ought to have been meant for Carter. Even in space, white men get off easy. It would be nice if someone could acknowledge that the biggest moral reckoning for a man who fought for the Confederacy ought to be making amends for the cause he served rather than moving on after he was widowed. John Carter has a lot of serious themes on the table, but it can’t prioritize between them, and ends up doing well by almost none of them.

It’s too bad that there’s so much human (and Thern) sturm und drang in John Carter, because the Tharks are far and away the most charming part of the movie. As Tars Tarkas, Willem Defoe is a combination of world-weary and very funny. “Your spirit annoys me,” he tells Carter, who refuses to give up when the two are sent into an arena to fight some nasty beasties. When Carter leads the Tharks on a bold invasion of Sab Than’s capitol city, only to find out his forces are besieging Dejah’s home city of Helium, Tars Tarkas smacks him upside the head. Watching the Tharks try new things as necessity forces them forward, whether it’s flying, adopting an irritating Earthman into their ranks, or slowly embracing more sentimental parent-child ties.

It’s too bad that the originality of the Tharks is undercut by the fact that many of the action sequences involving them are pillaged directly from the Star Wars movies. When Carter’s first imprisoned prior to the arena fight, the shots of his prison are cribbed from Luke Skywalker’s imprisonment in Jabba’s palace. Carter’s fight against a nasty pair of white apes is set in a sand-colored arena much like the one in Attack of the Clones, and the mechanics of his win suggest he’s seen Skywalker successfully fight a Rancor. And a series of fights on hovercrafts are borrowed, both in their dynamics and the way they’re shot, from the Endor chases in Return of the Jedi.

And it’s also too bad that, despite the fact that Thark society’s one of the only things in the movie that feels specifically Martian and as such, is much more interesting to watch than the rather pointless bickering between two human societies, director Andrew Stanton spends so much time on his insufficiently developed human characters. He does best with Dejah Thoris, who is promising is promising in concept—she’s introduced to us first as a scientist, second as a princess, and third, as a competent fighter—but less so in execution. She’s saddled with ponderous lines like “If you have the means to save others, would you not take every action possible to make it so?” that sound more like the starting point for philosophical debates and less actual conversation. If her romance with Carter is meant to be a ring-of-fire transplanetary love, there just isn’t enough time for Stanton to plausibly develop it. And the movie brings up and then drops the fact that Dejah’s supposed to be on the breakthrough of a major scientific discovery. Battle sequences, apparently, are more fun than lab work, even lab work that opens up the universe.

Similarly, Stanton utterly wastes Dominc West’s sly, sexy charm on Sab Than, making him a retread of the evil rapist he played in 300. The Therns—ostensibly representations of Mars’ goddess protector, but actually rapacious devastators of worlds—are constantly talking about how stupid and violent Sab Than is. The only moment he gets to be a person with motivations or a brain is when he shows up to woo Dejah, explaining “I feared you’d been tortured by Tharks and condemened to die in their arena. I couldn’t have that on my conscience. I do have one, Princess.” But there’s no room in this movie for a genuine romantic competition between John Carter and Sab Than, or for any really serious—in a fun way—thinking about Mars’ future. We’ve got a dog in this fight—the excellent Woola—but this marvelous monster’s more entertaining than the contest he’s a part of.

I know Kyle Buchanan is being sort of snarky in this post about why Mars movies have such a dismal track record at the box office, but I think there’s a tie between this sort of sentiment and our conversation from earlier in the week about the need for thoughtful science fiction. He writes:

Why are audiences so turned off by our planetary neighbor? They don’t seem to have the same hang-ups about the moon, which has factored into big hits like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Apollo 13 (as well as critically acclaimed movies like Moon), but that rock is movie-ready: Stories set there simply have to be told in romantic black-and-white. Meanwhile, setting your movie on red, red Mars is like staring into a Virtual Boy for two hours, and who wants that? (Evidently not John Carter director Andrew Stanton, whose Mars is more tan than red.) It helps, too, that the moon is such an ever-present presence in our lives, as well as a place that Americans have actually been. If NASA can’t motivate an administration to send a man to Mars, why should the average moviegoer get worked up about it?

Why should the average moviegoer get worked up over Mars movies if there’s absolutely no rationale for a movie to be set there? I have a fuller review of Disney’s sci-fi blockbuster John Carter coming tomorrow, but there is zero reason the events of that movie need to take place on Mars, which I assume is only the setting because Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote the books on which the movie is based thought it was cool. Ditto on pretty much every other movie with a tie to Mars—it’s a little further away from the Moon, and we haven’t had human contact with it, so it’s easy to project ideas of wacky things onto it. But that doesn’t mean those wacky aliens or evil forces derive anything interesting or significant from the fact that they come from or are based on Mars.

By contrast, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy works because there are very specific reasons for the characters to be going to Mars—an international consortium has decided it can viably made habitable (as a way to make it potentially mineable and a population escape hatch for Earth)—and a great deal of the novel’s plot is drawn from Mars-specific forces. The amount of radiation the characters are getting both drives them close together in protected habitats and encourages the experimentation that leads to a treatment to reverse aging. The religion that develops on Mars, the areophany, is specific to the planet. The political and philosophical debates are directly tied to how people feel about Mars’ geography and geological history. It’s really a shame that we can get an infinite number of failed and hugely spectacles set on Mars, but we can’t make a series or a television show out of a fully-realized, very smart Martian adventure that (other than some special effects work to show the Martian gravity) could be made pretty darn cheap.

The bridge is yours.

-The only celebrity memoir I’d even contemplate purchasing.

-Another reason you should catch up on Enlightened so you can watch it next season.

-Michael Chabon on his life-long relationship with Edgar Rice Burroughs.

-Amazon v. the Independent Publishers Group.

-This is basically the perfect role for Ben Stiller:

Since market research came back with some deeply awful numbers about audience anticipation that suggest that America has basically no interest in seeing John Carter, Disney’s epic and epically expensive movie set on Mars, there’s been a lot of dissection of the way the movie has been marketed. But I want to return to the first big decision in that campaign: to change the name of the movie from A Princess of Mars on the grounds that nobody goes to see movies about women, to John Carter of Mars, to John Carter.

The thing about John Carter is that it’s totally nondescript. This literally could be the name of anything—there have been 8 movies made that are simply called John, and they’re everything from creepy horror movies to drug flicks to foreign films. John Carter could be the name of a cubicle drone or a futuristic warrior. The novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs that the movie is based on may be lovingly remembered, but they’re not part of the canon like Ender’s Game. This name means nothing to be people. A Princess of Mars, or a variant like John Carter and the Princess of Mars, would have at least provided the crucial context that this movie is set some place other than the planet Earth.

And the central premise, that women don’t see enough science fiction to make up for the presumed hordes of men who would run in horror at a move with “princess” in the title is just bizarre. Sure, there are action movies that don’t involve romances. But the vast majority of the time, whether a dude is stealing cars or blowing up planes, he is also wooing a member of the fairer sex. Even if Disney is assuming that its audience is shy dudes who are afraid to talk to women in real life, that audience still seems to enjoy watching Paul Walker or Brad Pitt or whoever spit game and bed ladies. Would that they’d turn out consistently to see women be strong and powerful and be the ones who are delivering lines and seducing guys. But when Disney is setting the bar for their expectations of their audience even lower than I assume it is, dudes and women alike should find themselves insulted.

All of which is a way of saying this fan-made trailer looks amazing:

So, John Carter:

I haven’t read the books, and I’m not sure it would make a difference. But I find myself weirdly depressed by the idea of a movie where a character is magically transported from one vicious sectarian conflict (the Civil War) to another one, on another planet. Maybe there’s just no escape velocity from war and territorial violence. Or maybe the lessons of one world are meant to redeem another, a hope that seems vainly and permanently disproved — it’s too hard to see our errors coming at us from a distance to avoid them fully. Or maybe I’m overthinking this. But it does sort of put a damper on my enthusiasm about futurism and space travel to think that we’ll encounter the exact same problems all over again out there in the great beyond. I almost don’t care if there are bad things out there in our fiction if they’re new, and reveal something different about ourselves.

-Brunch goes apocalyptic.

-NBC is more positively perceived than it was in 2010, but that does mean folks are going to turn in for its awesome, low-rated programming?

-If you game, you’ll give two years of your life to playing.

-Sad monsters.

-I’m not sure John Carter will be good (or has accurate Martian geography), but it does look awesome.