I have not seen The Lone Ranger. But I did see that it bombed in a way that is going to stain Johnny Depp's illustrious track record over the past decade and change. I suppose the question is going to be why? And unlike Dredd, a fantastically made actioner that bombed, I actually have an answer. Kids don't know who the flying fuck the Lone Ranger is. Batman, Superman, Iron Man, Captain America and all the Avengers have been active in comics, cartoons and video games since the 70s. Generations have grown up pretending to be The Dark Knight and Big Blue. Not many kids since the 60s have donned domino masks and six shooters foiling robberies. There are a few reasons for this and putting them all together forms the plan for a box office bomb.
I think the fact that the movie starred Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer is very telling. And that is how the movie came across. It was Johnny Depp, Tanto, the sidekick of the story, who takes top billing and Armie Hammer, the Lone Ranger, the hero of the story who comes in second place. While it makes sense that Depp gets pushed to pull in people, it doesn't make sense why these two men were even in this movie. Well actually it does, because there was no one else. There's no western stars anymore. There's no more macho tough American actors. Johny Wayne, Lee Marvin, Lee Van Cleef and a whole host of tough guy cowboy/soldier/boxer/Mongolian emperor (John Wayne is the only one in this category) types anymore. Everybody does something. Chris Evans is Captain America, but also the guy from Not Another Teen Movie as well as awful romantic comedies. Granted he was also Johnny Storm (which we'll all pretend didn't happen), but actors go all over the ballfield. There's no template for movie cowboys anymore, there's nothing to compare these men to and there is no precedent for children to see what a cowboy movie is.
The western genre and the American cowboy have not been popular for children in a long, long time. There's SpongeBob and anime and no space for cowboys. Besides, the western genre has all but disappeared from main stream media. There have been some fantastic "westerns" that weren't set in the old west as of late. The Proposition showed how dynamic the genre can be when taken out of the States and dropped into Australia. If anything, the western genre is alive in mature, adult oriented entertainment (I'm not talking about porn here, though there are a good number of them set in dude ranches and saloons). Or, like The Proposition, they take the concept of the western and use it to buttress stories, such as Django Unchained or The Last Stand. Knowing full well that Quentin Tarantino looked to Spaghetti Westerns, there is still the concept of man standing up to do what's right against impossible odds. And while this is nothing new, there have been plenty of stories that use such angles, the cowboy, the old west lawman, was part of American lore that bent the truth to fulfill the purpose of storytelling. It was domestic bravery at its best, something more than the wars in Europe and Asia could be.
Most importantly, the reason the Lone Ranger was not a success was because the lynchpin of westerns is quite simply the gun. The six shooter, the Colt, sidearm, it is something that has become taboo in modern America. Heroes are not brandishing guns anymore. Due to the fervor and public perception of firearms, guns have become a negative aspect of main stream society. Rambo (from First Bloods 2&3) and the Terminator would have had a tremendous amount of trouble if they came out now. Superheroes don't use guns. You know, except when they do. Batman has vehicles that have enough fire power to level a city block, Iron Man's suit could destroy a country and Superman's dad in Man of Steel is apparently Jason Bourne. But that notion that cowboys and old west lawmen relied on their shiny pieces of .45 firing steel does not sit well with people.
In closing the fact is that the only cowboys kids really know about are playing in Dallas and have a ridiculously over the top stadium. And on 4th of July weekend what kids want, kids get. Single guys are too busy getting hammered and burning themselves by touching grills, fireworks or being under the sun for too long to go to a movie theatre. Parents will take their kids out of the heat into the artic meccas of mountains of popcorn and gallons of tonic and what the kids want to see is what the kids will get. Moreover, The Lone Ranger went up against Despicable Me 2, animated films are being made better and better each year and have jokes that parents get, so a mother and a father are more willing to chuckle at the lines that fly over their kids' heads for a few hours of peace. In any event, hopefully studios will see that the western needs to be reintroduced. Smarter, smaller and better crafted films that focus on the core values of the American Legends of the Old West.
By the way, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly might be one of the greatest films of all time if not the greatest film of all time. It's not impossible to make a movie half as good as that, which in turn would be doubly better than The Lone Ranger.
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