WTF Happened to The Lone Ranger?



Walt Disney Studios has had a pretty abysmal year at the international box office in 2023. Between Ant-Man 3, The Little Mermaid, Elemental, Indiana Jones 5, and perhaps most disappointing, The Marvels, the typically successful movie studio has lost an ungodly amount of money by producing overly expensive feature films that failed to resonate among the masses and earn back their financial investments. If the studio isn’t careful and the trend continues, Disney could break another record for the all-time biggest box-office bomb on record.

Speaking of which, what would your answer be if you had to guess what Disney’s most notorious financial flop of all time? Well, up until recently, the correct response would have been John Carter, the disastrous 2012 adaptation of Edgar Rice Boroughs’ A Princes of Mars. However, after tallying up the receipts in 2023, Disney’s most infamous box office failure now belongs to The Lone Ranger, directed by Gore Verbinski and starring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer. Of course, losing hundreds of millions of dollars is one thing the studio must account for, overcoming the reputational hit of one of the most problematic productions in Hollywood history is quite another. Yet, while much of the public focus regarding The Lone Ranger has to do with the epic commercial failure and scathing critical response, many people overlook how damned and doomed the making of the movie was in 2011-2012. Between the production delays stemming from the budget spiraling out of control and the outbreak of chicken pox to weather problems and dangerous wildfires to Depp’s near-fatal horseback injury to the literal death of a crew member on set, the tragedy of the film extends far beyond the economics. Saddle up Kemosabe, it’s time to find out WTF Happened to the Lone Ranger ahead!

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37 thoughts on “WTF Happened to The Lone Ranger?”

  1. I disagree with the idea that the movie should have been cancelled. I find this move to be extremely disrespectful to all the people who worked on a movie. Just like when someone is "cancelled," this idea buries the work of everyone else in the production. This movie sounds like a complete disaster, but at least the cast and crew can point to something they made. Cancelling a movie punishes everyone in a production for things they didn't do.

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  2. Such a bummer. I am in the minority, but I enjoyed both John Carter and the Lone Ranger. However, I did notice the weird monster rabbit at the beginning (jackalope maybe?) and thought after that scene there was a missing supernatural element.

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  3. I noticed how many scenes could have been combined, how often certain beats are repeated, and how we have to wait till we get the Lone Ranger. Did we even need the framing device? Then the villain's emasculation is not set up. The tone is Wild Wuld West then it is a harrowing dark adventure.

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  4. The budget situation doomed this movie, but I think casting Johnny Depp was a major misstep. The Jack Sparrow character works as a flamboyant pirate with relatively low stakes. As a guilt-ridden Native American? No.

    Had this movie come out a few years later the drama about Depp's and Hammer's personal behavior unrelated to the film would have derailed it even worse.

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  5. Being from the Ponca Tribe I was excited to hear Johnny Depp was in a western film until I realized he was playing Tonto, honestly I thought he would have been a great Lone Ranger. That being said I enjoyed the movie for its goofiness I realized it was going to be caricatures and not real characters.

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  6. Funny no one has even brought up that Jonny Depp was playing a Native American a white guy playing a Native American. A lot of my friends were incredibly insulted by this portrayal its a good thing we never saw the movie

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  7. I saw this movie in theaters on opening night. There was an old man there with his wife sitting in front of me and they were probably about 85. He was wearing a cowboy hat, and for the entire movie he would swing it around, yell Yee-haw, and pretend he was riding a horse. It was so hilarious, and the movie was so bad that it didn't even bother anybody. To this day it's still the funniest and oddest thing I've ever seen in a theater, but I'm glad I witnessed it.

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  8. Johnny Depp wasn't ostracized at all. He's had steady work in both huge franchises (Fantastic Beasts) and smaller films. In fact, both he and Armie worked steadily after this film; the only reason Armie fell off the map was because of his sexual assault allegations, which had nothing to do with his role as the Lone Ranger.

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  9. The Lone Ranger movie looked chaotic and just plain bad to me in the trailers and I didn't waste my time seeing it. I'm not always right in judging a movie by the trailers, but I got this right when I predicted it would be a critical bomb. It seems that Disney has learned zero lessons from this disaster.

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  10. I enjoyed the film but it wasn't really my thing. I remember thinking at the time it was probably a decade too late to be hitting any kind of nostalgia for the character. It was leaning heavily into Depp's box office appeal, but big budget westerns haven't been a thing except maybe during the genre's peak and even that's questionable. It was doomed from the start.

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  11. I guess I am in the minority but I absolutely loved this movie. I watched it twice on the cinema and both times everyone erupted in cheers once the Lone Ranger theme kicked in just before the climax.

    I enjoyed so many set pieces in this adventure. Sure, it was bloated and too long (like a few of the Pirates of the Caribbean films) but I loved the ride from start to finish.

    The only thing I did not like was the way they drained the colour out of the film's look. When I watch a film set in the great outdoors, I want to see the vibrant colours of the great outdoors.

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  12. Although I don't like the movie, the final action scene is truly awesome! Also hands down one of my favourite Hans Zimmer scores, it's a great-looking movie with great music. I honestly think if the film is half an hour shorter will be ten times better, oh well…

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