You can expect there to be a fairly massive push for this film in the early months of 2012 with hopes pinned high on Disney’s live action adaptation of John Carter (of Mars, but don’t tell anyone).

Entertainment Weekly have a new image of Mr. Carter facing one of the more terrifying alien foes in the film and they asked director Andrew Stanton to explain them,

[T]hey’re sort of an oversized gorilla in the books, and they’re kind of ubiquitous. They’re littered everywhere through at least the first several novels. They were always cool, just from a visceral standpoint, [but] they don’t really have a narrative function in the first book. So what we did is we made the White Apes a formidable creature that you kind of hear about throughout the movie…

We needed a scene where Carter was going have to get out of his execution sentence in order to move the story forward, and we thought what better than having to go up against this formidable creature?

Read more at EW and the link above.

Our man Taylor Kitsch? is John Carter and he is joined by the multifarious talents of  Lynn Collins?, Samantha Morton?, our (other) man Mark Strong?, Ciaran Hinds?, Dominic West, James Purefoy?, Daryl Sabara?, Polly Walker, Bryan Cranston?, Thomas Hayden Church?, and Willem Dafoe? so there’s plenty to look forward to as long as the script is enough to keep the scope of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ world.

If you’re in the dark about this whole John Carter of Wha… shenanigans here’s a modest, yet very helpful, synopsis. Go!

The film tells the story of war-weary, former military captain John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), who is inexplicably transported to Mars where he becomes reluctantly embroiled in a conflict of epic proportions amongst the inhabitants of the planet, including Tars Tarkas? (Willem Dafoe?) and the captivating Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins). In a world on the brink of collapse, Carter rediscovers his humanity when he realizes that the survival of Barsoom and its people rests in his hands.

Image follows. Click if the mood takes you.