It was released in the United States by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures on March 9, 2012, marking the centennial of the titular character’s first appearance. It was presented in Disney Digital 3-D, RealD 3D and IMAX 3D formats. It received mixed reviews, with praise for its visuals, Giacchino’s score, and the action sequences, but criticism of the characterization and plot. It failed at the North American box office, but set an opening-day record in Russia. It grossed $284 million at the worldwide box office, resulting in a $200 million writedown for Disney, becoming one of the biggest box office bombs in history. With a total cost of $350 million, including an estimated production budget of $263 million, it is one of the most expensive films ever made. Due to its poor performance, Disney cancelled plans for Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars, the rest of the trilogy Stanton had planned.

John Carter’s failure has been blamed on its promotion, which has been called “one of the worst marketing campaigns in movie history”. Critics focus on the decision to remove the words “Princess” and “Mars” from the title out of fear of alienating young men and women, leaving prospective audiences to try to deduce what the film was about from trailers and ads that were similarly uninformative about its characters and plot, its place in the development of science fiction, and who had made it. The images they showed also seemed derivative of works such as Star Wars, Dune and Avatar that were themselves informed by the Barsoom stories. Other critics have argued the film was doomed from the start since those works had so thoroughly appropriated the source material as to ensure that modern audiences would see John Carter as unoriginal.