The news Friday that Disney was hitting the stop button on a planned reboot of “Lone Ranger” with Johnny Depp was greeted by a chorus of surprised reactions around Hollywood, followed by tentative explanations.
In Depp, director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Disney had a team that had collaborated on three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. And they had a title that was immediately identifiable to an older generation, expanding an audience for a film that could already play well to the youth crowd. In the era of big-budget filmmaking, this was the form par excellence, from the studio that practiced it as often and as well as anyone else.
And yet Disney had decided, at least for now, to halt the movie in its tracks.
The consensus feeling in Hollywood is that, whatever the other doubts (“Lone Ranger’s” appeal to an international audience, the viability of the western, Bruckheimer’s mixed recent record), the main concern was a matter of dollars and cents. The movie could cost as much as $250 million, and the studio and filmmakers couldn’t see eye to eye on making that figure work, not with the other doubts looming…