Trivia / The Lone Ranger (2013)

• Billing Displacement: Both the trailer and the poster show Johnny Depp's name first before Armie Hammer's. Beyond that, the masked face in the poster is Johnny Depp's too.
• Box Office Bomb: With a production budget of $225 million ($400 million including marketing), the film probably needed to earn over half a billion worldwide to break even and around $800 million (more than the top 4 grossing westerns ever combined) to really make a profit. Instead, Ranger got blown out by Despicable Me 2, the former earning only $48.9 million in its first five days (compared to about $143 million for Despicable), ultimately pulling in around $260 million. This movie not only surpassed John Carter as Disney's most humiliating flop, it is in the top ten (adjusted for inflation) biggest box office bombs in movie history and severely damaged the careers of almost everyone involved.
• Creator Killer: Before this flop, Gore Verbinski had a lot of good repute in Hollywood with many successes (like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which was box office gold; and Rango, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film). Afterwards was a different story; Verbinski only made one film since, the underperforming A Cure for Wellness.
• Dear Negative Reader: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Gore Verbinski, and Jerry Bruckheimer responded to the negative reviews by saying that critics "conspired" to take down the movie. Critic Alonso Duralde's response to this claim is quoted at the top of Critical Dissonance.
  "If film critics could destroy a movie, Michael Bay and Adam Sandler would be working at Starbucks. If film critics could make a movie a hit, the Dardenne brothers would be courted by every studio in town."
• Executive Meddling: Disney delayed production on their movie after the underperformance of Cowboys & Aliens. While they would have saved hundreds of millions had they read the writing on the wall, the decision to then continue the project led to other issues.
• Fake Nationality: The Caucasian Johnny Depp is playing Tonto, who is Native American.
• Franchise Killer: Pretty much did for the Lone Ranger franchise what Batman & Robin did for the Batman series… times a few million (Batman and Robin, for all its faults, didn't lose nearly as much money). Needless to say, don't expect this series to pop up again anytime soon.
• Saved from Development Hell: It appeared at one point in time that the film would never be made due to its budget coming in at well over $200 million, in part due to the poor performance of Cowboys & Aliens.
• Star-Derailing Role: This film negatively affected both leading men's careers for several years.
  • This was the first chink in Johnny Depp's box-office armor. Combined with Transcendence, Mortdecai, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, and many point to this as the critical and commercial tide turning against him. The only other box-office hit he had for the rest of the decade was Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, in which his cameo role was kept secret until the press screening. Then came the nasty divorce and domestic abuse allegations from Amber Heard, which went on to spawn its own series of events.
  • To a lesser extent, the film threatened to derail Armie Hammer's career, compounded by the disappointing box office performance of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015). He's since found more success as a character actor in smaller projects. Just like Depp, his real life controversy wound up ruining his reputation far more than this film ever could.
• Stillborn Franchise: The film's critical thrashing and expensive failure sent the prospects of a 21st century revival of The Lone Ranger for Disney, copyright holder DreamWorks Animation AND future copyright holder Comcast/Universal right over the cliff, though Disney ended up having to foot the writedown for the project (that price tag was much larger than what DWA paid for the company that had a boatload of rights including The Lone Ranger).
• Troubled Production: Originally pitched in 2007, it changed hands several times and had the script rewritten at least twice. Then in 2011 Disney delayed the start of production due to concerns about the budget and greatly frustrated Gore Verbinski, though in the end Disney's concerns turned out to be quite founded. Once filming actually began in 2012, it was delayed repeatedly by inclement weather, wildfires, a chickenpox outbreak and the death of a crew member who was working in a water tank, and at one point Johnny Depp was nearly trampled to death by a horse. And to top it off, it lost between 95 and 120 million dollars putting it in ninth place in the list of the biggest box office flops ever.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Reportedly the original script had more of a full blown fantasy feel to it, with Cavendish being an actual Wendigo.
  • Seeing as how DreamWorks Animation got the rights to The Lone Ranger as part of their Classic Media package, Disney would have likely needed to discuss further licensing with them for the series's future. The film becoming one of the biggest bombs of all time and earning a lot of derision for its fantasy take on the series made any talks between the two studios over future films meaningless ^note  Disney lost more money on the movie than what DreamWorks Animation had shelled out to get the rights along with other franchises in 2012 , though Disney still had the characters in their Disney Infinity series at the same times (ironically, the other side of DreamWorks that Jeffrey Katzenberg is not really a part of was partially responsible for the other Western killer, Cowboys and Aliens, which almost convinced Disney to not let The Lone Ranger see the light of day). Any more attempts to keep Disney's Lone Ranger universe uphill through other means (primarily merchandising) were put down for good when NBCUniversal, perhaps Disney's biggest rival in the mass media, bought DreamWorks Animation several years later, giving them the rights to The Lone Ranger (plus Disney Infinity was discontinued altogether and won't receive any further updates past the summer of 2016).
  • When the film was in development under Columbia Pictures during the early 2000s, Tonto was almost going to be given a Gender Flip into a female love interest for the titular protagonist.

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