James Purefoy, Mark Strong and Thomas Haden Church have all signed on to join John Carter of Mars, the live-action adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's books from Pixar's Andrew Stanton. Honestly, if this film sounded any better it'd be Pavarotti.

So the previously cast Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) is John Carter himself, a US Civil War veteran who goes to sleep in a cave after being chased by Apache Indians and wakes up on Mars, known as Barsoom. There, he meets such weird and wonderful characters as Tal Hajus (Haden Church), a vicious Thark warrior; Kantos Kan (Purefoy), Captain of the ship Xavarian, the kingdom of Helium’s grand warship and Matai Shang (Strong) ruler of the godlike Therns.

For those of you colour-coding at home, that means that Church's character belongs to the savage race of Green martians, so we're guessing he'll be largely unrecognisable, being 10-12' tall, green, four-armed and with eyes on the sides of his head. Purefoy's character is one of the Red martians, so basically humanoid, while Strong's character is one of the white-skinned Thern, who are bald but wear wigs (much like every Strong character then, boom-boom).

The three actors join Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Dominic West, Polly Walker, Samantha Morton and Willem Dafoe, in a film that awesome author Michael Chabon is writing. In the immortal words of Kirsten Dunst, bring it on.