The Mystery of The Lone Ranger

Well, it gives me no pleasure to kick a man while he's down, so while i will not be reviewing The Lone Ranger as a movie, i will be attempting to analyze the reasons for this movies faliure. The lone ranger is now the biggest box office bomb in history, in fact, of the five biggest box office bombs in history, three of them are Disney movies, with The Lone Ranger being the biggest bomb of all time. Disney expects that they will have to attribute a loss of 160 million in their entertainment division during the third quarter of 2013 solely due to this film. I reviewed the trailer for this film back in march and predicted that it would bomb, and i would be lying if i didn't feel a small smidge of smug satisfaction at this films failure, despite the fact that it was not exactly a difficult call.

The lone ranger cost Disney 215 million to produce, and when factoring in marketing and distribution costs most likely cost Disney 375 million at the end of the day. The New York Times estimated that the film would have to gross 800 million in order to break even when factoring in revenue splits from cinema's. The film grossed a mere 217 million dollars, a monumental failure by anyone's standards. The highest grossing western of all time is Dances with wolves, which grossed 424 million dollars worldwide, thus the lone ranger would have had to gross twice as much as the highest grossing western of all time, to simply break even, madness! It is also important to note that the most successful western of the past few years was Django Unchained, which is simply a masterpiece and which was exclusively a film for adults.

Interestingly enough, studies showed that over 50 percent of all ticket sales were to over 25's, and 25 percent were to over 60's, much higher than for a traditional Disney movie, thus the real issue here is marketing, Disney marketed this film to children, and except for Disney's 2004 Home on the Range, there has really never been a successful western for younger audiences. Really Disney never should have marketed this film to kids, and should have released it under its touchstone banner, remember that this is the studio that released Nightmare Before Christmas under Touchstone, because it wasn't suitable for children. One can imagine that if this film had been marketed differently, perhaps more adults would have gone to see it.

Without commenting on the successes and failures of the movie, it is easy to see with this films inflated budget, marketing campaign and the projects general misguidedness, why this film failed so epically.