Andrew Stanton And Producers Deny 'John Carter' Budget Reports

No one ever thought Disney's John Carter was going to be a cheap movie. To create a world worthy not only of author Edgar Rice Burroughs but director Andrew Stanton and the studio behind the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, lots and lots of money was going to have to be spent on the effects, the sets and much more. But as production rolled on over several years, reports pegged John Carter as an almost runaway train with an out-of-control budget. One article even said the film would have to make $700 million to be considered for a sequel.

According to the film's director and producer, those rumors are false.

At the film's press junket, Stanton and producer Jim Morris both emphatically denied these allegations and, in fact, said the film came in on time and under budget in some places. Read more after the jump.

Here's what producer Jim Morris, who has worked in different aspects on films such as Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and more, had to say to me on the subject:

One thing that is frustrating is while this is a very expensive movie, we didn't go wildly over budget. We went a couple points over budget and all of that was... We had planned for summer shooting, but we did a little bit of additional to kind of hone stuff and tighten it up and so forth. [That wasn't] because things needed fixing, just because we wanted to improve them. So when you're reading this stuff it's sort of like 'Well, judge the movie.' We executed the plan we came up with for this. There wasn't anything wildly out of the box. A lot of the things, like the visual effects for example, came in under budget, which is unheard of. So that stuff is just all bullshit. I mean just to say it. I'm not saying the movie wasn't expensive, it was very expensive. It was expensive from the day we started, but it didn't get out of whack or out of control.

Andrew Stanton, the Oscar-winning director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E, agreed, flat out saying the film was not in anyway the out of control production it was painted by in the press:

It's always frustrating to hear lies put out there. And it's always frustrating to see how people are so gullible. I mean by now people should know that if you read it in print, that doesn't mean its true. And if you read it in print on the Internet, it's really not true.  It's easy to ignore when it's not true.

The director expanded on that to additional outlets, such as the following over on Movieline:

I want to go completely on record that I literally was on budget and on time the entire shoot. Disney is so completely psyched that I stayed on budget and on time that they let me have a longer reshoot because I was such a good citizen, so I find it ironic that we're getting accused of the opposite.

We'll have much, much more on John Carter in the coming weeks before its March 9 release including one on one video interviews with Stanton, star Taylor Kitsch and more.