You probably already knew about it. Thanks to skipping around Ain’t It Cool News, now I do to. The movie is going to be directed by Andrew Stanton – click on the name to see why the animation fanboy behind you is cooing, or just contemplate the mystical and wondrous Power Word: “Pixar” – but apparently it’s not going to be animated:
Discussing the move from fully 3-D animated movies to live-action, Stanton added: “I think that’s the only way. I mean, there are so many creatures and characters that half of it’s going to be CG whether you want it to be [or not], just to realise some of these images that are in the book. But it will feel real. The whole thing will feel very, very believable.”
Stanton has apparently wanted to do this movie forever – a life choice that I wholeheartedly and retroactively endorse for him, by the way – and he’s going to keep John Carter as a Civil War veteran… which is another way of saying that he apparently has no real desire to go all deconstructionalist and post-modern ironic on the book. Which is good, because it avoids messiness all around. Sure, yes, they’ll have to muck with the plot a bit, given the episodic nature of it – but for me the Barsoom books were in a lot of ways all about the look of the thing. Give me the look and I can shrug if the plot’s not quite Burroughs.
Frankly, probably so would he.