The sound somewhere in the distance of a slight sigh of relief that you faintly hear is from all those Disney execs relieved that their $300 million sci-fi epic John Carter didn't do as disasterously as been been feared and predicted by many insiders.

The film, orginally called John Carter of Mars and based on stories written a century ago by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, had the " …of Mars" dropped from the title months ago by Disney execs who felt that it would scare off women filmmgoers. The reason, according to the studio's marketing dept., was that they felt that since chicks don't dig sci-fi, having "..of Mars" in the title would scare all of you off since you only care about cuddly, frilly things all dressed up in pink.

However,.the fim went way over budget and advance tracking indicated that filmmgoers' interest in the film, especially among those all important adenoidal 14 year old boys, was very "soft"'

Though the film needs to do Avatar business worldwide before Disney can start to break even on the film, Disney said if the film does $30 million opening weekend domestically than that would be enough for them and they got it.

But the film has a very long way to go to even make the break even point. That is unless, of course,  the word of mouth is unbelivably good, which it won't get.

Meanwhile The Lomax held the number one slot again and Eddie Murphy's A Thousand Words fared poorly as expected.