One Of Disney's Biggest Box Office Flops Is Also One Of The Highest-Grossing Westerns Ever
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Westerns have remained an enduring part of the cinematic landscape for decades. While we're pretty far removed from the genre's peak popularity, it remains a key vehicle for storytelling. Shows like "Yellowstone" have helped revive the genre for modern audiences in some ways. But Westerns have rarely been big box office draws in the blockbuster sense. Generally, they represent a nice return on a smaller investment, not unlike horror.
What's strange, though, is that one of the genre's highest-grossing movies is also a notorious box office bomb. The movie in question is "The Lone Ranger," which became one of Disney's biggest box office flops when it hit theaters in 2013. Based on the classic character of the same name and directed by Gore Verbinski ("Pirates of the Caribbean"), Disney hoped to make a Western that could be as big as the biggest blockbusters ever made. That's not how things panned out.
The movie centers on the Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer), who teams up with a Native American named Tonto (Johnny Depp) to seek vengeance after justice has failed them both. Just for context, the highest-grossing Western of all time is "Django Unchained," which is also Quentin Tarantino's biggest movie ever, with $425 million worldwide. It carried a hefty $100 million budget, which is on the higher end for this genre, to be certain.
That's worth remembering when we consider that "The Lone Ranger" was really, really expensive to make, reportedly carrying a $250 million price tag. That number doesn't even account for marketing. The fact that the biggest Western ever (which wasn't even released until late 2012) couldn't justify a budget nearly that big wasn't a good omen
Westerns are rarely as big as The Lone Ranger (in more ways than one)
Disney and Gore Verbinski had issues getting the budget under control, as evidenced by the inflated final price tag. Verbinski, in a 2013 interview with /Film about "The Lone Ranger," explained the movie's stop-and-start process, which was largely about wrangling the budget. He explained:
"Every big movie gets shut down. Whether you read about it in the paper or not is a different story. But I mean every time you conceive a narrative and you storyboard it and then you start the process of bidding it, it takes months to figure out how much this stuff is going to cost and how you are going to execute it. Then you present that number and it's just a knee-jerk. The studio is going to say, 'That's great. Can we have it for thirty percent less?'"
This movie's issues have been well documented, so we're not going to go over all of that, but critically, it was a non-starter, and when a movie is this expensive, it has to resonate. Oddly enough, Quentin Tarantino loved "The Lone Ranger," but his praise didn't do much to save this big-budget Western from disaster.
Hitting theaters in the summer of 2013, Verbinski's ill-fated Western made just $260.5 million worldwide, barely eclipsing its hulking budget in global ticket sales. It was an enormous money loser for Disney. Yet, perplexingly, it also stands as the third-biggest Western ever at the box office, not accounting for inflation. It trails only the aforementioned "Django Unchained" and Kevin Costner's Oscar-winning epic "Dances With Wolves" ($424 million worldwide). The next-closest is 2010's "True Grit" ($252 million worldwide), with a relatively steep drop-off from there.
The Lone Ranger was too big for its own good
The filmmakers and stars said that critics made "The Lone Ranger" fail at the time, but it's rare that critical opinion alone can move the needle that much. With a budget of that size, this movie needed to make in the neighborhood of $600 million worldwide to even begin to be considered a success, at minimum. It was simply too big for its own good.
At the same time, it still stands as one of the biggest movies, in terms of raw dollars grossed, that the Western genre has ever produced. What that tells us, in retrospect, is that there was an audience for a movie like this, under the right circumstances. If Disney and Gore Verbinski could have made it for over/under $90 million, it could have worked out. But that's not the reality we live in.
Most of the biggest box office bombs of all time were made after 2010, and much of that has to do with the "franchises above all else" mentality that has invaded Hollywood over the last 15 years or so. Disney was as guilty of that as anyone, producing other notable bombs like "John Carter" and "Tomorrowland" during this period. In this case, they believed that Verbinski could work his "Pirates of the Caribbean" magic on this once-beloved property.
$250 million budgets are almost never acceptable. Only the rarest of rare surefire bets can justify such a sky-high price tag, like an "Avengers" movie. Giving any movie in the Western genre a budget anywhere near that big is a recipe for disaster, even though Disney gets to claim they made the third-biggest Western of all time.
You can grab "The Lone Ranger" on DVD or Blu-ray from Amazon.