'John Carter': Without the source material, would there have been a 'Star Wars'? -- VIDEO

With a little more than three weeks before John Carter hits theaters on March 9, Disney still has a helluva task ahead of them: Get audiences on board to see a sci-fi adventure with an ambiguous title (at best), an untested star (Friday Night Lights‘ Taylor Kitsch), and a series of trailers that have purposefully kept much of the main plot a mystery.

To that end, the studio released a clip from the film today, featuring the title hero and Martian princess Dejah Thoris (X-Men Origins: Wolverine‘s Lynn Collins) as they first encounter a rabid horde of Warhoons, who appear to be under the influence of a conniving alien called Matai Shang (Mark Strong). Accompanying this clip is a featurette in which the stars of the film, along with director Andrew Stanton, sell the notion that without Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original “John Carter of Mars” novels — the first, A Princess of Mars, is the main source for John Carter and was published 100 years ago — some of the biggest titles in modern science fiction would not exist, from Star Wars to Avatar. Check out both clips below:

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