New John Carter Image Online

**Update: **Six new images have been released by Disney and can be seen in the gallery at the bottom. They incude pictures of Lynn Collins' Dejah Thoris, Willem Dafoe's Tars Tarkas and dog-like beast Woola.

You know how it is – one minute, you’re just a giant, slavering beast trying to potter quietly around your cavernous desert pit when a longhaired lunatic sporting pumped-up pecs and a massive chain comes to disturb your peaceful afternoon. And just when you start shouting to ask if he’d really rather stop being such a nuisance, he starts try to fight you! The nerve! Such is the life of the White Ape as seen in this new picture from John Carter over at Entertainment Weekly.

The movie, of course, finds X-Men: Origins’ Taylor Kitsch as the titular hero in a tale adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Carter, a US Civil War vet, finds himself transported to Mars (called Barsoom by the locals, hence the name of the series), where he has to deal with various enemies on the war torn planet. And not only that, but he faces off against the lumbering White Ape, the biggest and most ferocious beastie of the Martian ecosystem.

To see a full-sized pic at EW, click the image above.

According to director Andrew Stanton, he decided to save the beasts – which show up much earlier in Burroughs’ story – for a big climactic clash: “They’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, but you never really witness. There’s a subtle sense of anticipation for what these things might be like. Then Michael Kutsche — who did a lot of the designs on Alice In Wonderland – came up with this design on his own, for just their scale. He made them nocturnal, almost like moles — they stopped using their eyes, and just had a heightened sense of smell. We just love that. ”

There’s more from Stanton over at EW. John Carter will be out on March 9, and you can read yet more about him in a future issue of Empire. The next trailer is scheduled to come online on December 1.