Why was the Lone Ranger considered a box office failure?

Why was the Lone Ranger considered a box office failure?

One of the main reasons was the hugely excessive budget allocated by Disney. At a budget of $250 million many critics believe that for a movie with only two characters the budget did not need to be so huge. As the movie was a retelling of an originally simple western, it also need not have had so much effort placed on the effects which cost a huge sum of money and made it next to impossible to make the huge budget back at the box office.

The combination of the director Gore Vebinksi and actor Johnny Depp is also important as in their previous movies the pair have made a lot of money for Disney so pairing them together in another movie made obvious sense on the surface. However even if the audience were attracted by the actors and director it still didn’t take off as expected. Johnny Depp personally blamed negative critical; response towards to film, claiming critics had it out for the film before it was even in the cinemas. When a movie opens its fate relies heavily on the reporting of the media much like political reporting, when the media decides a movie is in trouble it begins a death spiral that’s nearly impossible to escape. This coupled with bad rumours surrounding the movie during its production, along with allegations that the production had been shut down at one point. On top of bad reviews and bad word of mouth, the modern interest in western movies is arguably minimum, summer blockbuster movies usually aim to be an easily recognisable franchise, this may explain why the sequel to Despicable Me made almost three times the amount made by the lone ranger on its opening weekend. The Lone Ranger is not a widely known franchise, especially among the age groups aimed at by the film, due to it being over 80 years old, because of this the only audience who would be able to connect with the original story would more likely be the grandparents of Disney’s actual intended audience.

Its failure to connect with critics was also extreme, On Rottentomatoes.com the movie scored a mere 28% positive reviews, with one critic calling the movie a 2frustrating exercise in overkill, a kind-of, sort-of interesting idea but buried in summer-movie excess.” Another critic added “An appealing pair of leads, but they’re not enough to make up for the Lone Rangers bland script, bloated length and blaring action overkill.” The movie is also 149 minutes long, this when compared with older classics from the western genre, which were shot on tight budgets but still achieved success, makes the Lone Ranger look like an exercise in overkill of length as well as overkill of budget.