why ‘The Lone Ranger’ was considered to be a box-office failure

‘The Lone Ranger’, directed by Gore Verbinski, starring Johnny Depp, was destined to be a ‘box-office bomb’ in the UK, due to its low ratings and bad reviews from USA film critics. Depp blames the failure of the film, on the ‘poor reviews’, which he thinks were written seven to eight months before the film was released. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer says “I think they were reviewing the budget, not reviewing the movie.” So could the failure of ‘The Lone Ranger’ be down to America’s harsh critics scaring the public viewers away?

According to TheIndependent.co.uk ‘The film is regarded as the come-uppance for director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer after their run of success with ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies.’ With them saying this it provides us with another reason why ‘The Lone Ranger’ was said to be ‘a flop’. Due to the public and critics viewing of the highly rated ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’ films, their expectations were set way to high and left them disappointed when ‘The Lone Ranger’ didn’t reflect the same standards as the phenomenal ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies.

Despite all the bad critique and poor reviews, ’The Lone Ranger’ still gave many viewers and critics something to rave about.  From multiple reviews and ratings posted on the website, RottenTomatoes.com gives ‘The Lone Ranger’ an average rating of ‘3.5/5’ and states that ‘60%’ of audiences said they liked the film. However there are just as many good reviews as there are bad. According to MaryAnn Johanson, a critic who posted on RottenTomatoes.com, ‘The Lone Ranger’ was ‘Limp, lifeless, overlong and undercooked’. Here Johanson brings to light another reason why the film may have flopped.

Summer 2013 has brought some great movies and blockbuster hits to our screens. ‘Despicable me 2’, ‘Iron man 3’ and ‘Monsters university’ are just 3 of many feature length films that have been released this summer. Most have left a very high standard for the following film releases to live up to. However, ‘The Lone Ranger’, which was one of those following movies, doesn’t seem to have reached that mark. According to screenrant.com ‘the heavily subscribed release schedule has left a few casualties in its wake.’ These casualties include ‘The Lone Ranger’ amongst other movies released in summer 2013. Due to the amount of great movies released in such a tight period of time some movies got pushed aside and knocked under the shadows of other higher rated films. Timing of release seems to have contributed to the lack of interest when it came to the public viewings of ‘The Lone Ranger’.

The team behind Disney’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ was given a budget of $250million to bring the film back to life after the movie was shut down for the first time in 2011. The studio decided to ‘revive’ the project; however they only managed to re-coop a small fraction of the Money they spent when it was released in July 2013. It seems the lack of returns and profits put people off going to watch the movie.

Screenrant.com claims that ‘The reasons behind The Lone Ranger‘s drastic under-performance are difficult to pin down.’ And they are right. It is hard to just lay the entire blame on one factor. However there are so many factors that add to the harsh but realistic fact that ‘The Lone Ranger’ flopped.