James Cameron? This is how you cast a sci-fi epic. Pixar’s upcoming live-action adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough’s “John Carter of Mars” series, about a Civil War soldier transported to Mars, already has a storming cast lined up – while the leads, Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins, weren’t great in “Wolverine,” they’ve both done good work on TV, in “Friday Night Lights” and “True Blood” respectively, and the supporting cast is a veritable who’s who of acclaimed character actors.
Featuring Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, Dominic West, Mark Strong, Polly Walker, Thomas Haden Church and James Purefoy, one more’s been added in the shape of Emmy-award winner Bryan Cranston. The actor, originally best known as the dad in “Malcolm in the Middle,” has given his career a new lease of life with his extraordinary performance as a chemistry teacher dying of cancer who becomes a crystal meth dealer in the AMC series “Breaking Bad.” Unlike most of his co-stars, Cranston will be earth-bound, playing a Civil War colonel who butts heads with Carter. This suggests it won’t be a huge role, and he’ll probably be out of it by the first reel.
At one point, this seemed like a fairly big risk for Disney (undoubtedly one of the reasons it’s been in development for decades), but they’ve got to be feeling more bullish about it following the success of the similarly motion-capture “Avatar,” and with a cast of this calibre, and “Wall-E” director Andrew Stanton at the helm, this could be a film that works on the levels that Cameron’s epic doesn’t.