John Carter Movie 2 -
Cut to black.
Post-credits: A NASA rover in 2012 rolls over a rock on Mars. The rock has Thark glyphs. It reads: “He still watches.” The original John Carter failed partly because it was marketed as a generic action film but was actually a melancholic elegy about the loneliness of the perpetual warrior. Warlord of Mars would double down on that tone— The Revenant meets Dune , with the pulp poetry of Edgar Rice Burroughs reframed as a meditation on PTSD, colonial guilt, and the limits of violence.
He walks into Issus’s maw unarmed. And because she feeds on conflict, on resistance, on the fight —his surrender breaks her. Not a battle. An embrace. The film ends on a cliff of jade and copper, overlooking a slowly regenerating sea. Dejah holds Carthoris. Tars sharpens a blade he no longer needs. And Carter stands apart, watching the twin moons rise. john carter movie 2
Carter’s arc: He begins as the man who runs toward danger to avoid intimacy. He ends—spoiler—not by killing Issus with a sword, but by trapping her inside the one thing she cannot consume: the love between a father and son.
They just didn’t know it yet.
In the third act, Carthoris (played by a young actor with fierce, sad eyes) is captured by Issus, who offers to trade his life for the location of the Heart of Barsoom. Carter almost says yes. That is the moment. Dejah watches. Tars watches. And Carter—for the first time in his immortal life—lays down his blade.
Dejah walks to him. She doesn’t speak. She just takes his hand. Cut to black
Carter has aged only months. But his daughter from his first life, still alive and now a woman, confronts him in a boarded-up cabin in Virginia. Their reunion is not warm. It is raw. She asks where he disappears to. He cannot say Mars . He says, “War.” She replies, “You’ve always loved it more than us.”
It would not be a crowd-pleaser. It would be a cult masterpiece—the Blade Runner 2049 of planetary romance. And in an era of superhero quips and weightless CGI, a John Carter sequel that asks, “What does it cost to be a good man in a dying world?” might finally find the audience that was always waiting for it. It reads: “He still watches
Logline: Haunted by the ghosts of a war he didn’t start and a family he can’t protect, the immortal Warlord of Barsoom must unite the dying planet’s fractured city-states against a parasitic god from beyond the stars—only to discover the greatest threat to Mars is the Earth he swore to forget. I. The Weight of Victory: Where We Begin The film opens not on Mars, but in a rain-slicked alley in 1888 New York. John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), now a silent, restless ghost in his own world, walks among the living but belongs to the dead. He has returned to Earth to honor his promise to Dejah Thoris: to find a way to bring their infant son back to Barsoom safely. But Earth feels smaller now. Gravity is a cage. The colors are mud. And the nightmares—green tharks, white apes, the blue-lipped smile of Matai Shang—arrive with every thunderclap.