The Big Picture: The Lone Ranger: What Happened?

[mesoforte]

Say Bob. The Lone Ranger is Summer 2013's biggest flop. But didn't The Lone Ranger open at No.2 in the Box Office and has made over $100 million? And then there's that Robot movie which opened at No.3 and has yet to make $100 million. I'm not saying anything Bob. Just making an observation.

Neither has made 100 million in the US box office (Lone Ranger grossed over only if you count worldwide sales.) Pacific Rim is still in the opening weekend, but it made more in the opening weekend than Lone Ranger. So I definitely wouldn't call it a flop.

IMDB Lone Ranger:

Box Office
Budget:
$250,000,000 (estimated)
Opening Weekend:
$29,210,849 (USA) (5 July 2013)
Gross:
$71,467,292 (USA) (12 July 2013)

And worldwide courtesy of Box Office Mojo:

FOREIGN TOTAL - 7/3/13 $24,300,000 50.6% $48,000,000 7/14/13

IMDB Pacific Rim:

Budget:
$180,000,000 (estimated)
Opening Weekend:
$37,285,325 (USA) (12 July 2013)
Gross:
$37,285,325 (USA) (12 July 2013)

FOREIGN TOTAL - 7/11/13 n/a - $53,000,000 7/14/13

 

[Machine Man 1992]

Good analysis, but this part stuck with me the most:

"...Toy Story [2]...is almost 20 years old."

That makes me feel incredibly old.

Has it really been 20 years?

It's been twenty years, three presidents, and two apocalypses, two wars, and the Rapture since we were first introduced to Buzz and Woody (which sounds vaguely sexual, now that I'm old enough to know what sex is. )

 

[shrekfan246]

I could have sworn Toy Story 2 was only thirteen years old, I was already around 10 when I saw it *checks* yeah it was released November 99 so "almost twenty has old" is overstating it a bit.

The first one.

He used a picture from Toy Story 2, but was talking about Toy Story, where the character arc was about a cowboy feeling replaced by a space ranger because sci-fi was the new 'in' thing.

OT: The whole thing sounds like a huge clusterfuck to me. Fortunately I never had any interest seeing the film in the first place. It is all too correct that Hollywood probably won't realize the actual reason it's a relative flop, though.

 

[Lightknight]

That, and buying into the idea that it's okay for Johnny Depp to play a pirate from hundreds of years ago but you have to be the same race as the character you're adapting. Unless you're not white.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b0ftfKFEJg

The logical fallacy in your comparison is so grossly obvious, that I assume any explanation more complex than that would be lost on you.

I'm honestly surprised that the producer/writer didn't just do one of those "raised by Native Americans" rewrite that producers have a prerogative to make nowadays. I had honestly assumed that they'd do that and am shocked that, no, he has to be a full blown actual Native American for some reason. This came down to bad directing and bad writing. These things could have been easily side stepped.

I will say that this can be done in a generally "ok" way. Robert Downey Jr. basically acted out the entire Tropic Thunder movie in blackface. I mean, holy heck if that isn't the biggest no-no possible and from what I can tell there was little to no backlash because the issue was addressed in the movie in legitimate manner.

 

[Pills_Here]

(this is only partially on topic but bare with me)

I really don't get the whole "Brick by brick" thing. As much as I find what Movie Bob has to say interesting, I really don't think I'd pay money for a deconstruction of a game that I've already played to death over the past 2 decades. Maybe if they were just a series of Let's Play videos, I don;t know.

 

[Jenny Jones]

How to make a modern day western: See firefly and/or serenity.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

Why does the movie industry seem to be run by the stupidest people on the planet? Seriously, their tendency to make the wrong decisions and learn the wrong lessons from their failures every single time makes Homer Simpson look smrt by comparison. At least he occasionally learns something, even if he has to forget it by the next episode or they'd run out of things to do episodes about. So how did they get where they are today? How did the industry not collapse under their leadership? It's as baffling as how the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant never became the next Chernobyl.

 

[Teoes]

God, whenever I hear that quasi speech impediment Bostonian slipping in my mind immediately blocks everything out. Just another American having a hissy-fit because things didn't go their way.

American, no. 1 according to no one.

Things didn't go his way.. American no. 1.. what? He called it before release as being a stinker in the making, thought it was a stinker after he watched it, then gave a brief explanation of some of the things he thinks made it a stinker.

I think your Bostonophobia really did a number on your understanding of the video because you seem to have completely missed the point. I've read your post a few times and cannot see any kind of relevance between it and the video you're commenting on.

 

[Vivi22]

Say Bob. The Lone Ranger is Summer 2013's biggest flop. But didn't The Lone Ranger open at No.2 in the Box Office and has made over $100 million? And then there's that Robot movie which opened at No.3 and has yet to make $100 million. I'm not saying anything Bob. Just making an observation.

You didn't actually listen to what Bob said in the video did you?

The Lone Ranger is a flop because, even though it made millions of dollars, it is no where near making enough money to have been profitable. As it stands now, it is still hundreds of millions of dollars in the red.

Pacific Rim has been out for a weekend and almost made back half of it's budget in that time. Not bad for a brand new franchise with no big name stars in it.

 

[NvrPhazed]

How to make a modern day western: See firefly and/or serenity.

How about the Cohen Bros' True Grit? It's my 3rd favorite western behind The Shootist (2nd), and El Dorado (1st).
Firefly may be like a western in space, but its main focus was the characters and how they interact with each other. Western's (usually) are more about a Hero's journey or a quest for redemption/revenge (ala John Wayne westerns, Lone Ranger TV, Shane, etc.).

 

[PunkRex]

Well to be fair the whole bird thing didn't have anything to do with Tonto being a n indian
It had everything to do with Tonto himself being insane.

Personally I found the Comanche's reenactment of the end of The Last Samuri to be WAY more offensive. Fucking lemmings.

Why you rip on my favourite film? Im fairly sure the real Samurai didn't go out quite as spectacularly but its still a good battle and the message seemed legit. I know the term Samurai mean't alot of things in Japan back in the day and they didn't all go on about honour and duty but I don't see how it's offensive.

 

[JimB]

Why is it not okay for Johnny Depp to play a fictional Native American when most Indians in westerns were played by Jewish men?

It's not really appropriate for those Jewish guys to have done it either. The problem is that there are actual First Nations actors (First Nations is the term to refer to the people who lived in America before the Pilgrims, right? Apologies if not) who did not get the role in favor of giving it a white man. White men do not need more jobs in Hollywood. There are other actors out there of the appropriate race who would have been at least as good for the role as Johnny Depp, yet none of them were cast because there's a white dude who wanted the job. Given America's history of white people taking whatever we want from the native population, that's a serious dick move.

 

[PunkRex]

Pacific Rim has been out for a weekend and almost made back half of it's budget in that time. Not bad for a brand new franchise with no big name stars in it.

*Looks at Perlman and Elba* How dare you...

 

[coil]

God, whenever I hear that quasi speech impediment Bostonian slipping in my mind immediately blocks everything out. Just another American having a hissy-fit because things didn't go their way.

American, no. 1 according to no one.

And here I came to the comments thread specifically to say (as a Boston transplant) that every time Bob's Bostonian accent leaks in I just giggle a bit. It's such a fun accent.

 

[Lilani]

It sort of blows my mind a bit that during the same week the Lone Ranger "bombs," a trailer for this Disney live-action movie comes out.


I can hardly comprehend how excited I am about this movie. And next to the Lone Ranger and the motivations behind it...my mind simply can't handle the fact that this stuff is coming from the came company right now.

 

[faefrost]

Westerns are cool.

Westerns are America's legends, or at least the legends of the America that we have become. The gunslinger is America's knight in shining armor, our samurai, our cultural exemplar of a hero. The Western is a story about a hard man living in a hard time, a man who doesn't want to be a killer but must in order to battle the killers threatening those he loves. The Western is a story about a man who, after the entire movie has been spent piling pressure on him, becomes willing to take damnation onto himself in order to protect those who can't bear that burden not because he's broken and has become a beast but because he has made a choice as a man to embrace what of the beast he can use as a man. The Western is set in a nearly fantastical world we barely recognize where water is scarce and where enemy armies are camped out in the darkness just beyond our sight. The Western is a magical experience when done right, and if one is in a theater I will always go see it.

I did not go to see the Lone Ranger, and I never will, because I have no reason to believe it is a Western. I have seen nothing to suggest it has any understanding of what makes a Western great, and from what I've heard, no one else has seen that either.

This is not intended to rebut anything Mr. Chipman said. I'm sure his analysis is spot-on, and even if it isn't, I haven't seen the movie myself so I don't get to call him a liar. I'm only saying the Lone Ranger did not really want to be a Western, and that is a source of great sadness for me.

This is a very very astute observation. The first pirates of the Caribbean worked, not simply because of Johnny Depp's weird and wacky character. It worked because at it's heart it was a dead on perfect Swashbuckling Pirate Adventure movie. It channeled the days of Erol Flynn and company. It worked in its chosen genre and context. The later movies decreased in impact in large part because they failed to appreciate what worked in the first and focused more and more on the wrong things. They keep trying to go bigger and more spectacular instead of focusing on the core of what tells the story.

And they did the same thing here. People wanted a good classic Westerner. Preferably something clean and upbeat. Something that modernizes the west of Randolph Scott or John Wayne. Not as much the dirtier darker later stuff. Instead we got this over the top action mess. Huge ass train fights? Evil military? Mental illness? Cannibalism? Johnny Depp was certainly not the cause of this. He was merely a symptom.

And the movie also illustrates the other problem in Hollywood today. The one that it shares with AAA gaming. Costs escalating past the point of being able to reasonably recoup them. Lone Ranger made a $100 million in 2 weeks. The Heat made a $100 million in two weeks. One of them is the years most unexpectedly successful movies. The other is the years biggest flop. Show of hands, who understands why this is?

 

[triggrhappy94]

Holy shit! I'm almost twenty.
I hadn't noticed.

OT:
Wasn't the guy who originally played Tonto white too? I remember that coming up in an episode of the Sopranos.

 

[ShadowHamster]

I'm tired of all these god damn trolls on this god damn forum! If you can't appreciate Bob's slight(pretty slight so far)left view of wanting equality through shown action then why are you here!!!! It paints a large swath of his views and you clearly are too dense to give his ideas the time of day!

Get the hell out!

 

[Grabehn]

I stopped caring (never did thou) about this films when they said "it's going to have werewolves" just to follow it after a few months with "now it won't, btw it costs near as much as John Carter" Which was really funny. I've never understood what's with Disney having Depp in every movie as Bob explained. I didn't like Charlie nor Alice in Wonderland. They were just paler, less drunk versions of Jack Sparrow, but Burton seems to make that a profitable thing.

I could have sworn Toy Story 2 was only thirteen years old, I was already around 10 when I saw it *checks* yeah it was released November 99 so "almost twenty has old" is overstating it a bit.

While the picture he showd was TS 2. Toy Story was released in 1995 and WAS the Space vs Cowboys thing. That's almost 18 years ago... Well shit, I saw it on theaters... Oh fuck you now, I'm feeling old and it's your fault! (jk)

 

[Monsterfurby]

Watching this, I realised how odd the whole US discourse about race actually is. Getting riled up about having to cast roles of a certain race with members of a certain race is, by definition, in and of itself racist.

I get that the US have a bad track record in terms of civil rights, and that this kind of backlash is basically a direct result of that. However, I don't think that Johnny Depp playing a Native American is the issue. I get blackface being offensive because of the history associated with that kind of performance, but I don't get the stigma on cross-casting people of different origins.

Admittedly, Depp's performance makes it offensive to Native Americans. Then again, if he were playing a teacher, it would be offensive to teachers. Or to humans. Or to vertebrates. Or to anything consisting of matter. You get the idea.

And yes, I know I sound like a Eurosnob when pointing out that "it works here, why not in the US", but I am just completely baffled by how this is an issue.