I'm gonna see the carter movie anyway, but if they wanted to make something that wasn't so risky, they coulda made the kid-friendly cartoon version of those martian stories.  just think of all the commercial tie-ins, parodies of botched martian spacecraft missions, marvin the martian et al..  it could be like another "cars" franchise.  they can put their creativity on auto-pilot and keep churning those "cars" movies out for years.