walking in and going down the red carpet behind Kitsch. She saw Ross call him over and whisper something in his ear, after which he suddenly stepped back. When she caught up to Kitsch, she asked what Ross had told him that had so affected him. " 'It's a disaster.' He just told me, 'It's going to be a fucking disaster.'" Post-release criticisms In the LA Times the week after the release, industry insiders suggested two reasons the film might have struggled to succeed with audiences regardless of how well it had been made or marketed. One was that more recent franchises, such as Star Wars, that had derived and borrowed from Burroughs' original concepts in the century since it had been written had exhausted the potential for audiences to be enthralled by any modern adaptation of his work. Jacks, the producer who had tried to make a film of the work in the early 2000s, recalled having given director Robert Zemeckis the novels in order to interest him in the project. "I don't think so," Zemeckis told him after reading them. "George [Lucas] has really plundered these books." Another industry marketing person, speaking anonymously, told the Times that modern audiences have a "cognitive dissonance" problem with films set on Mars based on older works. At the time Burroughs wrote, little was known about conditions on Mars, allowing an author to fill in those gaps with invented details. However, modern audiences know from the many actual unmanned missions to Mars that that planet is uninhabitable and apparently devoid of life. "You're not able to sell [Burroughs's vision]", he said. Two of the film's supporting cast members weighed in later in the year on the role marketing played in its poor box office performance in separate interviews with The A.V. Club. In July, Cranston called its cool reception "unwarranted" and blamed it on TV stations around the country focusing on commercial news about how John Carter had underperformed and not even won its opening weekend rather than offering a review of the film, leading viewers to make their decisions about what movie to see on that basis. "Why is it all of a sudden important for average Americans to know how much money a movie made at the box office?" "I don’t know why it's done so badly, or that it's perceived as being the [biggest] flop in Hollywood history", West