It's typically not wise to question the decisions made by Pixar. Since releasing the first Toy Story in 1995 no other studio, on a percentage basis, has been more successful critically. Cars, seen by many as the weakest Pixar production, still has a 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That said, their most recent move - changing the title of John Carter of Mars - is quite confounding.

According to Dark Horizons' Twitter Page, the live-action, Andrew Stanton-directed John Carter of Mars has had its title shortened to simply John Carter. Based on the Barsoom series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the film stars Taylor Kitsch, Willem Dafoe, Mark Strong and is due out next March. Joining the Pixar film in the name-changing department is the Andrew Niccol directed Now, which has been retitled In Time, The change is actually the second for the project, which was originally known as I'm.mortal.

While I'd agree that In Time is better than both of the previous titles for the Niccol project, I don't understand the move by Pixar. Like Lawrence of Arabia, John Carter of Mars has an real epic ring to it and lets the reader imagine that the entire red planet belongs to one man. Meanwhile, anyone who isn't familiar with the Burroughs source material is going to have no idea what John Carter is (it's a fairly generic name that says nothing about the actual film). There's still plenty of time before the marketing materials start rolling in, so one can hope that they eventually come to their senses and change it back.