John Carter of CGI

We know that SWINGERS guy Jon Favreau is busy welding the armor for IRON MAN, leaving his planned PRINCESS OF MARS to ultimately collapse behind him. But the massive adaptation of Edgar Rice Borroughs’ literature (the first of several in the JOHN CARTER series) might now be jetting from Paramount to Disney, where it could live on as a digitally rendered “performance capture” film from director Robert Zemeckis and his tech.

The story follows a war veteran named John Carter as he’s suddenly transported to the red planet and thrust into a world of beastly plants, hulking four-armed brutes and one royal hottie. While such an FX-filled prospect would surely prove inordinately expensive for a live-action film, the CG animation route could end up being the perfect medium for such a sci-fi leviathan — “human” characters interacting with an alien world would look seamless.

I thought the “performance capture” technique as seen in POLAR EXPRESS was more creepy than Christmas classic, but moments in MONSTER HOUSE showed significant potential for the format’s ability for the fantastic – the sort of dazzlingly unreal imagery that will hopefully melt our retinas in BEOWULF, and now possibly PRINCESS. And if the Team Zemeckis rumor doesn’t pan out, even Pixar pushing their polygons on the project would prove promising.