I also enjoyed JOHN CARTER for the popcorn movie it is, as did my kids. As to why it is "failing" at the box office:
1) The bloated budget. An IO9 article correctly points out that critics were more than happy to pounce on the leviathan budget, more so than criticize lesser budgeted movies like the lame LORAX, at least according to IO9, in the following article. I also love the title of this link!
http://io9.com/5894393/the-fact-the...ter-is-a-flop-makes-me-want-to-stab-everybody
2) The bloated budget! Worth mentioning more than once, because if this was a 100 million dollar movie, people could look at the worldwide gross and think that this wasn't a bad performance. If it was a 40 million dollar movie, it would be doing well! For me, there is no excuse for this kind of budget.
3) The story is old hat now!!! Not only that, I saw THE PRINCESS OF MARS on SyFy and it's the same fricken story done for a lot less. Sure the effects work was lame by comparison, but I did find myself caught up in a similar plot that was supposedly made for a measley $500,000!
$500,000 gets you this!
Another $249,500,000 gets you this!
4) The title. THE LORAX is kicking ass, because...... it's a really cool title. Plus, you can add "Dr. Seuss" to it. JOHN CARTER sounds like it could be about anything, where as AVATAR and STAR WARS give an indication as to what the movies are about. That's why they aren't called "Jake Sully" and "Luke Skywalker."
5) "Mars." Ha ha!
Another article pointed out that most movies about Mars tend to bomb:
"Consider the intragalactic evidence! Last year's animated feature Mars Needs Moms was a famous bomb so big that it took down an entire company. The early-aughts rush to pump out expensive Mars movies was just as disastrous: Mission to Mars barely grossed $60 million, Red Planet took in around half that, and Ghosts of Mars was such a demoralizing failure that it took director John Carpenter nearly a decade to make another feature. One of the Rock's rare flops? The Mars-set Doom, which only made $28 million. The lowest-grossing Tim Burton movie of the last fifteen years and change? That'd be Mars Attacks! The John Cusack drama The Martian Child wasn't even set on Mars, and it, too, is the lowest-grossing wide-release movie Cusack has made in the last fifteen years... it seems the red planet will have to fall back on its one unmitigated success: Total Recall, the 1990 Arnold Schwarznegger classic that's heavily set on Mars."
I think JOHN CARTER was entertaining. If you aren't bothered by a huge amount of CGI, then you should enjoy the movie and the slug-dog character that runs 300 MPH. It is not meant to be realistic or heavy on the drama. I have to admit that I found the Princess to be very attractive.