of its opening weekend box office, for John Carter was returned to Disney in mid-February and shared both within and without the company. Nikki Finke reported in Deadline Hollywood that the numbers pointed to a serious failure. Barely half the likely audience was aware of the film, 27 percent said they were interested in seeing it, and only 3 percent said it would be their first choice that weekend. An executive at a rival studio told Finke that demographic data with the "shocking" tracking for such a costly film showed that women in particular "have flat out rejected the film" and expected "the biggest writeoff of all time." Finke reported that she had heard estimates of a loss around $100 million, but allowed that soft numbers had been widely expected as Disney's in-house surveys had been showing them for some time. Disney told her that the Super Bowl ad had given the film an expected "pop of awareness" and the studio remained committed to a full marketing push before the release. Chabon says that on the eve of the premiere, he was in a hotel down the street and Disney's marketing department was showing the team the latest tracking. "None of it was good", he recalled. Despite doubts and awareness of previous occasions when such dire forecasts had been wide of the mark, "[w]e just all kind of knew at that point it was going to be bad. It was not going to go well." Just before the film was released, an Evercore analyst who followed Disney more than doubled his estimate of the likely loss, to $165 million, because of the tracking. Other analysts had similarly revised their estimates upward, to $100 million or more. Premiere Disney scheduled the late February premiere for Regal's LA Live Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, rather than the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, which it owned and had renovated extensively. The choice of venue has been described as "odd", since Disney had held most of its premieres, particularly of big-budget franchise films, there since the renovation. In a news release announcing the premiere, Disney highlighted that the movie would be shown in 3D on a screen to an audience of 800 in three theaters, ranging from the cast and crew and company executives to critics, D23 members and winners of contests. Collins, still unaware of the negative media perception of the film, recalls