Maybe They Should Have Kept Her

Of course, hindsight is always 20-20.

While "John Carter" was bombing so hard at the box office the past few weeks, "The Hunger Games" was getting the financial success that Disney was hoping with the "John Carter" series. To some degree, there is a slight coincidence here and a poetic justice. The person responsible for bringing "The Hunger Games" to the screen and own the rights to it and subsequent series, is Nina Jacobson, a one-time head of Disney's Buena Vista Pictures before she was fired.

While her partner was giving birth to their third child six years ago, Jacobson took a phone call from her boss, Walt Disney Co. film chief Dick Cook, to learn she was fired. After overseeing hits including “The Sixth Sense” and “The Pirates of the Caribbean” as head of Buena Vista Motion Pictures, Jacobson was let go in a round of cutbacks.

I suppose Dick Cook didn't last that much longer with the company either. In that business, often times the circle of people involved in these things is very small. You eventually bump into the people you crossed path with, or worked with.

Still, one wonders if Disney's live-action movie fortune would have been different had Jacobson continued with the company. So far, their intention of generating smaller number of movies but creating possible franchise out of them has not been working.

Zz.