Lone Ranger Goes Boom! To Tune Of $150 Million Loss
- Thread starter Karloff
- Start date
Man, what an unusual epidemic of old IP mining that they're doing all the time now. But I guess the movie looked alright on paper. Big names in the film, famous IP, modern budget. It falls on the shoulders of directing and writing then.
1. Everything was perfect on paper is probably one of the reasons it tanked. 2. How the fuck is Johnny Depp playing a native American perfect on paper. Some people.
I can't speak for all bitches, but for me I don't like characters having their races swapped (especially when they're originally Nordic) and I don't like poor representations, and they're different things. Idris Elba's acting talent/style is not under fire when I say I didn't like him playing Heimdall, it's that Heimdall isn't canonically black. I didn't mind his black Heimdall, but I'd rather Heimdall wasn't black. On the other hand, Johnny Depp did play a Native American character, in the same way actors in Cloud Atlas played characters of other backgrounds, which I have no problem with, but in this case he did a hopeless job and wasn't suited to the role. Make sense?BoogieManFL said:
Hugely popular actors sometimes pull it off without much backlash if done tastefully. Did you notice that Robert Downey Jr. acted out most of Tropic Thunder in black face? I mean... that's pretty much the gold standard of all kinds of wrong but it didn't kick up much of any kind of dust because of the way it was done (in this case, it was meant to be a farce and the movie spent time jabbing at him).MeChaNiZ3D said:
I assumed it was going to be one of those "raised-by-Native-Americans" scenarios. You know, a reboot prerogative that would have been easy to make. Or at least that he would be heavily directed/scripted to keep things tasteful. So on paper, it was potentially a positive and don't think that people didn't go see this movie because Depp plays a Native American. He's the only reason many people are watching it at all. Had the movie been really good, people would have gone in droves.
Note, however, that this film has a HUGE disparity between critic reviews and customer reviews:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_lone_ranger/
Assuming that companies haven't figured out a way to throw the numbers off, a 27% critic score to a 64% audience score is significant (237% higher than the critic score). Not only that, but bad reviews usually skew audience scores downward because a lot of people can like the movie but be persuaded after/before the fact that it isn't good by reviewers they trust. So the audience enjoyment may have been higher in all honesty. But to put that in contrast, Grown Ups 2 got a critic score of 7% and an audience score of 90%. I think Lone Ranger's sin is being ok and not fantastic. You don't spend hundreds of millions on something and produce mediocrity. Even the Last Airbender in all of its awfulness was bad enough to generate more views. No one talks about boring.
But yes, everything being perfect on paper is likely what led to lazy writing and directing. Shame, I like westerns.