Disney's 2012 epic space adventure John Carter was a box office bomb — and the cult-classic Total Recall is to blame. John Carter was the long-awaited adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's novel series Barsoom. The movie is based off of the 1917 book A Princess of Mars, and was retitled to reflect the book's main character: John Carter. While multiple factors contributed to the movie's mixed reception, one key problem in John Carter can be tied to Total Recall — arguably the definitive portrayal of life on Mars in the sci-fi canon.
As John Carter is finding new audiences on Disney+, there has been renewed interest in Disney's failed franchise. Just as the The Mummy not only failed to launch Universal's shared monster universe but also caused productions to be cancelled, John Carter was originally intended to be just one installment in a trilogy, with the sequel already in pre-production before the first had its theatrical release. John Carter was so poorly received that the sequel, based on the novel The God of Mars, was cancelled.
The Mars adventure John Carter was a visual spectacle and boasted some truly exciting action sequences; however, the movie was criticized for being convoluted and derivative. In reality, the original novels in Burrough's Barsoom series were incredibly original at the time of their publication; however, the series heavily influenced the science-fiction of the 20th and 21st century, and many elements in the stories were repeated in other sci-fi space adventures, such as the 1990 movie Total Recall.
Arnold Schwarzenegger's violent sci-fi thriller Total Recall is a space adventure set largely on a colonized Mars, and, like John Carter, it was one of the most expensive movies ever produced at the time of its release. While Total Recall's screenplay was loosely based on a classic story by science-fiction icon Philip K. Dick, the movie greatly expanded the concept, fleshing out the short story to fill a feature-length film. In doing so, its screenwriters added various scenes, characters, and ideas, shifting the plot's focus from just Quaid's discovery of having implanted memories to a larger conspiracy on Mars. The stakes are greatly raised with the addition of a terrorist plot to destroy the planet's atmosphere. One of the most memorable moments in Total Recall is the characters' bulging eyes and faces as they struggle to breathe the Martian air.
Similarly, A Princess of Mars — the source material for John Carter — also has a climax dealing with the loss of atmosphere on Mars. In the book, John Carter must risk his life to save the planet's Atmosphere Plant, with him seemingly succumbing to asphyxiation in the process (only to awake back on Earth). Given how iconic the Total Recall scene is, it would have been difficult for the screenwriters to adapt this storyline for John Carter without seeming like they were "ripping-off" the previous film. Instead, John Carter was given a complex political background and a storyline involving a secret society and transportation medallions. The result was an overly-complicated story that failed to resonate with audiences the way Burrough's books had. Disney had tried to get a Barsoom adaptation produced as early as the 1930s — who knows what could have been if Total Recall hadn't come out first.