The News Blog of Comics Culture
Rich Ross, the head of Disney Studios since October 2009, has just been removed from his post. We can’t hope to know what it means—although lots of theories will be floated very soon—but flops like MARS NEEDS MOMS and JOHN CARTER are probably part of it. “Mars killed Rich Ross.” Even the impending mega-colossal worldwide superhit AVENGERS didn’t help Ross.
Marvel’s Junior Art Director Rich Ginter — the man responsible for many of their ad campaigns and advertising materials, such as this stylish Defenders campaign, is moving to Disney in California, Twitter tell us. There he’ll be a Digital Designer, where he’ll be “working on their comic/magazine apps & designing stuff for that and new apps.”
Although the Marvel invasion of Disney theme parks with such delights as Speedball’s Spinning Teacups has been retarded by the fact that Universal still has the theme park rights to most of the Marvel rides, Disney is finally getting in the act with an Avengers skin for one of the Disneyworld monorails. Disney had previously skinned the futuristic transport method with a Tron skin.
We’d ride that.
I know I said no more John Carter, but the appearance in my inbox of an email from Disney marketing announcing the existence of a clip and a poster for Woola, the faithful Martian Calot who steals every scene he’s in in the the film, is just so odd!
Well, it’s official, JOHN CARTER is being labeled a disaster, a flop, an “Ishtar” and anything else that signifies profit-and-loss ratio infamy. The media decided a while ago that this movie was going to be a disaster for Disney, and after finishing #2 for the weekend with barely $30 million—despite making over $100 million worldwide—every ill omen has been seen as sagacious. And the hate is baffling.
The most eye-popping adaptation of Burroughs ever, and perhaps the most naked Martians you will ever see.
The man who wrote the words “Oh, you, pretty chitty bang bang, chitty chitty bang bang, I love you,” is dead.
Well, he wrote half of the words. Robert B. Sherman, (above, far right) one of the Sherman Brothers songwriting team (along with Richard, who is still alive) has died at age 86.
He also co-wrote “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” and “Bare Necessities,” and “Chim Chim Cheree,” and…”It’s a Small World After All.”
Disney’s Facebook-based AVENGERS ALLIANCE game is a new direction for them, Variety writes, as they are putting more effort into these lucrative, reliable social media game as opposed to the volatile console game market:
Awesome.
Too little, too late?
Do not count out Andrew Stanton and Pixar!
With less than a month to the premiere of JOHN CARTER, Disney is releasing all kinds of new goodies, to try to explain why you should see this.
You can be sympathetic to Gary Friedrich’s current situation—older, broke and in bad health—while still being alarmed over all the issues his court case has raised. My own email and IMs are full of variant views on it. So let’s trace the evolution of this a bit.
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