Yes, the initial reviews were pretty lousy and westerns have a generally limited ceiling at the domestic and global box office. And sure the film’s violent content led to pundits warning parents not to take their kids and Johnny Depp casting himself as Tonto left the film wide-open to charges of ‘race bending’ (Depp allegedly has Cherokee heritage to the extent that it matters in this case). None of these things helped the final result, nor did a somewhat blah marketing campaign that took three prior mediocre trailers to finally put out a fourth scorcher. All of these things are problematic, but the chief cause of concern is that The Lone Ranger cost anywhere from $220 million to $250 million, which meant it had to have all of its proverbial ducks in a row just to break even. With costs like that, everything had to go right.
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