'John Carter' Teaser Poster Finds Its Way Online

Outside of a needless title change, we've heard very little about John Carter, formerly "of Mars," in recent months. Presumably that's because its Oscar-winning director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL-E) has been hard at work perfecting its extensive visual effects which employ full motion capture and more to tell the story of an American Civil War veteran (Taylor Kitsch) who somehow travels to Mars and is called on to help save the red planet. It also stars Willem Dafoe, Mark Strong, Thomas Hayden Church, Samantha Morton and Bryan Cranston among others.

Scheduled for release March 9, 2012, John Carter finished principal photography a long time ago and – finally – we've now got our first official look at the film in the form of a teaser poster. After the jump see the full image and read the latest on the highly anticipated Disney film.

Thanks to Disney (via JoBlo) for the image. Click on it to blow it up.

Not too revealing, but cool none the less. And I can't be the only one who finds it curious that the poster has a "J," "C," and "M" on it when they specifically took the "M" out of the title.

The last update we had on John Carter was in January when Andrew Stanton said that the entirety of 2011 would be spent doing "digital principal photography," meaning he'd be taking all of the real footage he shot and digitally manipulating it. Even with this first look at the film in the form of the teaser poster, we still have no idea what the creatures are going to look like and, in January, Stanton wasn't willing to say:

I didn't try to make it look like anything else. I really tried to make it its own thing. I tried to make a very historically accurate Martian film if that makes sense, so I'll let you decipher that.

Whatever that means.

In the realm of big 2012 movies: The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers, Man of Steel, Prometheus, Amazing Spider-Man, where does John Carter rank for you? When do you think we'll get a trailer?