The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2008–2013
The Lone Ranger: Disney's $375M western lost $160–190M
Disney spent $225–250M plus $150M marketing on a western no one asked for; it grossed $260.5M and Disney wrote down $160–190M.
Walt Disney Pictures · 2013-07-03
What happened
The Lone Ranger — Disney's western starring Johnny Depp as Tonto, directed by Gore Verbinski and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the team behind Pirates of the Caribbean — cost $225–250 million to make plus over $150 million in marketing: a $375 million bet on a character with no modern audience.
Released July 3, 2013 to hostile reviews and a soft holiday opening, it grossed $260.5 million worldwide — far short of the $650 million the New York Times estimated it needed just to break even. Disney's CFO Jay Rasulo told analysts the company expected a write-down of $160–190 million.
The failure was a corporate admission without precedent: in 2014, Disney studio president Alan Bergman acknowledged, 'We did lose that much money on those movies.' The film ended the Disney–Bruckheimer partnership's big-budget era and stood as the company's most expensive single-film mistake until John Carter's own accounting caught up.
Why it happened
- The budget was Pirates logic applied to a western: the Verbinski–Bruckheimer–Depp formula worked for a pirate franchise, but $225–250M on a masked-lawman property had no audience base.
- Production itself was a disaster: reports of ballooning costs, reshoots and a troubled shoot pushed the budget past $250M, and the film needed a hit-level performance just to break even.
- Disney's release strategy assumed the brand would carry it: a July 4 opening against Despicable Me 2, with a character young audiences had never heard of.
The lesson
A proven formula does not travel genres: the Pirates team spent $375M on a western no one asked for, and the write-down came from the studio president's own mouth.
Sources
- Deadline — Disney Expects To Write Down As Much As $190M For 'Lone Ranger'
- Wikipedia — The Lone Ranger (2013 film)
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