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.
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.
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. john carter movie 2
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.”
That is the wound the sequel will not heal—it will only cauterize. A psychic scream rips through Carter’s mind: Dejah . He falls to his knees, blood from his nose, and sees through her eyes: the sky over Helium is turning black. Not with clouds—with ships. Ships made of obsidian and bone. At their helm, a figure robed in light-devouring silence: Issus , the so-called Goddess of Death, revealed not as a myth but as a cosmic parasite. She feeds on the psychic residue of dying civilizations. And Barsoom, after a decade of civil war, is ripe. In the third act, Carthoris (played by a
Dejah walks to him. She doesn’t speak. She just takes his hand.
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. Dejah watches
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.
Cut to black.
They just didn’t know it yet.