Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
July 10, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Jay Barney: I guess Lone Ranger is the other end of the spectrum. If Despicable Me 2 was better by a third, Lone Ranger disappointed in the other direction. First impressions mean a lot, and when I originally saw the trailer a few months back I was turned off. The over-the-top action was enough to make me groan, and apparently a lot of other people thought the same way. Let me be clear, I do not think this is a rejection of westerns, as I think that is an under-tapped genre in the movie industry. Done right, westerns can do quite well (True Grit). Like White House Down last week, this is a dismissal of pointless stories with a needless emphasis on explosions and overdone conflict. Don’t get me wrong, I like the occasional smash’em up flick as much as the other guy, but two weeks of “stupid action” failures brings a bit of a grin to my face.
Brett Ballard-Beach: I am of two frames of mind here. One is that it is performing eerily similarly to both Wild Wild West and Cowboys and Aliens, which suggests that there is a ceiling for offbeat westerns whether they lean towards the sci-fi hybrid side of things or as a mashup of crowd-pleasing Bruckheimerness and somber reflection on the white man's genocide of Native Americans. The other is that this represents the worst-case scenario for attempting to jump-start a decades-old brand name that just doesn't have a place in today's world (on a much larger scale, this is about as disastrous as the last attempt 1981's nearly forgotten until last week The Legend of the Lone Ranger). As two asides, I would add 1) That it is not a good tactical decision (revisionist story aside) to have your hero's sidekick played by one of the world's biggest movie stars, and the titular hero... to not be played by one of the world's biggest movie stars. 2) I saw no trailers for this and so am simply floating off the reviews I read over the last week, but it also seems that there is an extreme level of violence in this film for something that bears the Disney imprimatur, and some of the critics reflected that they were surprised this got away with a PG-13. That word-of-mouth, if it was reflected in parents talking to parents, probably is responsible for this throwing under even the lowball expectations Disney threw out at the start of the week. I was almost consigning myself to thinking no more of this until one of the critics I place weight on gave one of the minority positive reviews and said that much like Spielberg's 1941, this is a sugary blockbuster with a bitter aftertaste that may need a couple of decades to get its due. I am a little more intrigued.
Edwin Davies: This seemed tired in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it was attempting to revive a character most people stopped caring about decades ago (and the overwhelming majority of the target audience have no experience of) without really trying to make him seem that interesting. On the other, the presence of Johnny Depp, Gore Verbinski and Jerry Bruckheimer suggests that they were trying to recreate the success of Pirates of the Caribbean, which was wrong-headed because the success of the first Pirates movie was a real lightning in a bottle moment, but also because audiences have soured on that franchise. The connection to Pirates doesn't have quite the potency that it might have had four or five years ago, so leaning so heavily on it in the marketing probably didn't do much to sell people on the movie. In addition, the ads themselves were a bit muddled, with some advertising the dark revenge aspect of the plot and others emphasizing the comedy and action. Then you throw in the fact that Armie Hammer is not a name by any stretch of the imagination and that people have grown a little weary of Johnny Depp being wacky in blockbusters, not to mention the very tricky notion of Depp playing a Native American, and I think you have a film that wound up alienating a lot of people before anyone had even had a chance to see it. The concept seemed shaky, the marketing was disjointed, and there wasn't much appeal in the cast. Throw in the bad reviews and you've got a perfect storm.
Daron Aldridge: First off, I have to give Disney some credit for owning how bleak the outlook and shoddy the returns are for Lone Ranger: "It's very disappointing. Everything was perfect on paper, so today was incredibly frustrating," said Disney EVP Worldwide Distribution Dave Hollis, (no relation to our own Kim Hollis). It's very different from last week's ignorance-is-bliss quote from Sony (that I happily repost): "We couldn't be more proud or supportive of the film Roland, Channing and Jamie created. This weekend's launch is just the beginning." If only Disney had realized that not everything was really perfect on paper two years ago.
As the story goes, August 12, 2011, was the date that Disney’s Bob Iger announced that the bloated budget concerns were delaying production for this film. Guess what had opened just two weeks prior on July 29th? Cowboys and Aliens. You can’t tell me that the financial disaster written on the wall from that film wasn’t the impetus for Iger to question this film’s budget. BUT still allowing it to be budgeted at $200+ million is not much of a compromise or legitimate reevaluation in my mind, as they reportedly only shaved off $15-20 million. The Daniel Craig/Harrison Ford film was the first comparison I thought of when reports of this masked flameout of a film starting hitting. Primarily because it was more recent but I can see the parallels between those two and Wild Wild West. How did Disney not see it? They were blinded by the prospects of Depp dollar signs. Bruckheimer had already given them the Prince of Persia misstep but Depp had been solid-to-stellar for them.
Simply, the most significant ingredients for what went wrong was greed and hubris, in my opinion. No one at Disney was willing to tell their Pirates cash cow trio “NO” and stick to it. The resistance they gave was tantamount to a parent saying, “No…you can’t have dessert until you eat all your French fries and finish drinking that milkshake.”
Bruce Hall: You have already obscure source material from a genre that itself has been out of style for decades. You have lots of bad press about cost overruns, egos, and production shutdowns. You have an obvious attempt to craft an offbeat, Pirates of the Caribbean style franchise using the same creative team, and putting Johnny Depp out in front of it, with his face all covered in liquid paper and a dead bird on his head. And then you have Depp trying to turn Tonto into some kind of self serious atonement for centuries of White Guilt. And let's not forget Cowboys and Aliens, reminding everyone how much nobody likes westerns anymore. It didn't matter whether you were in the business, an entertainment reporter, a casual blogger or just Johnny Nine to Five on the street, you could smell the stink on this thing over a year ago.
Nobody cared, nobody wanted to go, and very few people who did seemed to enjoy it much. This was a train wreck from start to finish, a cataclysmic disaster of global, even - dare I say it - John Carter proportions. Disney should have pulled the plug on this after they shut down production, but - and I can't prove this - I suspect the idea of conceding failure on your shiny new Johnny Depp franchise was just too much embarrassment to accept. How ironic.
Max Braden: I think the trailer was fine, despite being a western, this held the potential appeal of a family-friendly adventure with Johnny Depp being his offbeat self. I think the reviews (well, the movie at its core) *killed* any buzz for this movie. I'm shocked that the Rotten Tomatoes score is as high (26%) as it is, because the response I heard, from both reviewers and people who still decided to see the movie opening night, was universally bad. It all screamed flop - too violent for kids, too nonsensical for adults. I never expected a Raiders of the Lost Ark classic, but you have to be doing something Jonah Hex-level bad to screw a fairly sure thing up this badly. That's on the director and editor in my view. (Okay, I'm a little biased in favor of screenwriters Rossio & Elliott based on past adventures, but with this much money at stake, you can't film and can the movie with so many story flaws and then say "Sure, let's distribute that" without someone getting blamed for not trying to fix the problems in the script.
Kim Hollis: I think the problems this project faced have been covered pretty well by the responses here. For my part, my biggest problem with this potential franchise is that the Lone Ranger was pretty old-fashioned and boring to watch back when it was airing on TV during my childhood. And that was during the 1970s. Thirty years later, I don't feel any different - and it's clear that nostalgia was in no way a driving factor here. They'd be relying on Baby Boomers if that's the audience they were looking for, and Boomers don't go to films on opening weekend (for the most part).
David Mumpower: What I would note about the situation is that The Lone Ranger shares important similarities with John Carter. I am not talking about them being bombs or Disney projects. What I mean is that each title was debated for many years prior to production. Generally speaking, if a project languishes for an indefinite period, there are practical reasons for the reluctance. In order to overcome the rationale for hesitation, a project has to find a creative spark that differentiates it enough to justify bringing the title off the shelf. With The Lone Ranger, the hope of casting Johnny Depp as the sidekick/narrator would be enough. What we learned this week is that it was only a good foundation, nowhere near enough to anchor the film.
As others have mentioned, big budget action films set against western backdrops consistently fail. I would argue that The Mask of Zorro in 1998 was the last one to excel at the box office (True Grit is a different type of film than those under discussion). That was 15 (!) years ago. At some point, Hollywood is going to take the hint on this and stop being stubborn by releasing further attempts. If Johnny Depp cannot sell such a film with the power of the Disney marketing machine behind him, nobody can. The release of The Lone Ranger is the oft-quoted definition of madness, doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results.