The Lone Ranger crew blames critics and reviews
All the team behind the great budget flop The Lone Ranger, from actors to producer, have recently blamed the critics (in an interview) as a cause for the film’s little success at US Box Office (the Bruckheimer’s produced movie cost was around $250 million and it gained just $86 million in the States, thus far).
Johnny Depp said:
“I think the reviews were written seven-to-eight months before we released the film. I think the reviews were written when they heard that director Gore Verbinski and Jerry Bruckheimer and I were going to do The Lone Ranger. They had expectations that it must be a blockbuster. I didn’t have any expectations of that. I never do”.
Arnie Hammer is not happy either, and he claims the critics started to become ferocious when The Lone Ranger was stopped for a little period of time due to budget issues:
“They’ve been gunning for our movie since it was shut down the first time. That’s when most of the critics wrote their initial reviews. If you go back and read the negative reviews, most of them aren’t about the content of the movie, but more what’s behind it. While we were making it we knew people were gunning for it. I think it was the popular thing when the movie hit rocky terrain they just jumped on the bandwagon to try and bash it. They tried to do the same with to World War Z and it didn’t work, the movie was successful. Instead they decided to slit the jugular of our movie”.
Jerry Bruckheimer instead says that critics just reviewed the money, the “$250 million” and not the actual movie:
“I think they were reviewing the budget, not reviewing the movie. The audience doesn’t care what the budget it – they pay the same amount of money if it costs a dollar or $20m. It’s unfortunate because the movie is a terrific movie, it’s a great epic film. It has lots of humor. It’s one of those movies that whatever critics missed in it this time, they’ll review it in a few years and see that they made a mistake”.
Both cast and producer seems to have different opinions about this flop, but for all of them the main cause of this lack of success is the bad (and unmotivated) critics. Do you think that critics can actually influence the Box Office results, or these are just excuses?
Thanks Yahoo for the main interview, and don’t skip Worlds Factory opinion about The Lone Ranger is this Mattia Allegrucci’s review.
