I don’t think the dynamic (of a crowded summer marketplace) has changed all that.” But you still have to make really strong films. Iger added that looking at the studio’s release schedule in the years to come, Pixar, Marvel and the Lucasfilm brands “will help us rise above that din and compete effectively. A tentpole strategy is a good strategy,” adding that the “way to rise above the din and the competition is a big film - a big film, a big cast and big marketing behind it.” “We still believe in a tentpole strategy. “There has been a lot of discussion of the risk of high-cost tenptole films we certainly can attest to that given ‘The Lone Ranger,'” Iger said. “We think ‘The Avengers’ helped ‘Iron Man 3,'” Iger said, given the appeal of the superheroes in the film and the resulting box office haul. With $1.2 billion under its belt, it’s the second highest grossing Marvel film behind “The Avengers,” which earned $1.5 billion. Iger cited “Iron Man 3” as an example of a film that not only succeeded at the box office this summer but also outperformed the first two installments. “I don’t think it’s been more crowded or competitive (than previous years) although a lot of attention has been paid to it.” “The last number of summers have been quite competitive and crowded,” Iger said during the call with analysts. This news originated at Collider.SEE ALSO: Disney, Jerry Bruckheimer See ‘Lone Ranger’ as New Genre-Bending Superheroĭisney chief Bob Iger was frank on the status of the busy summer season that has left some films - Sony’s “After Earth” and “Smurfs 2,” DreamWorks Animation’s “Turbo,” and Universal’s “R.I.P.D.” struggling for attention.
Basically, it's a different vantage point."ĭespite the experienced hand of Verbinski, and the star power of Depp, The Lone Ranger was plagued by bad reviews, criticism over Depp playing a Comanche character, and the film sank at the box office, killing the fledgling franchise before it could properly begin. You turn everything upside down, you see, it's when a kid sees the gum under the table. And that's when everything changes for you. I think that's really when you're forced to look at things differently. When these guys in the 60s and early 70s started to mess with the genre and go, what happens to the guy on the horse when the automobile arrives? That is what fascinates me, that collapse of some bubble or balloon or belief system. And because of Tonto's perspective, it's in The Lone Ranger quite overtly. "That idea that the future is coming, whether it's the railroad, whether it's the East India Trading Company, it's there in Rango, the inevitability of the future and what happens to the gunslinger or Captain Jack or any of these characters when they're confronting progress. Instead of bringing in any supernatural elements, the filmmaker instead chose to tell the story of a changing world, where Tonto and The Lone Ranger come to realize they are relics of a bygone era. It is possible that Cavendish at some point was set to be a full-on werewolf before Verbinski intervened. One outlaw character, named Butch Cavendish, is shown to be a cannibal, that Tonto frequently refers to as a "Wendigo", an evil spirit that feeds on human flesh. While a werewolf feels like an odd addition to the world of The Lone Ranger, which was always grounded in reality and the cowboy films in their heyday rather than comic books, some trace of the supernatural creature did make it into the finished movie. And then, I pitched my original idea to Justin Haythe, and we just started working on the script." It was Johnny who called me and said, ' Can you come back in?' And he had sent me a photograph of him in Tonto makeup and the bird on his head. I think they had exhausted the other path. So that was off in some other cul-de-sac. It came back around like four years later, where Jerry had said, 'Do you want to come back on?' I said, 'Well, I'd like to do the version I was originally thinking about.' Somewhere in the interim, without me involved there was a werewolf, that's where the werewolf thing came from.
In an interview with Collider, the director of The Lone Ranger, Gore Verbinski confirmed the rumors that the movie was originally set to feature a werewolf character before he took the story in a new direction. Modeled in equal parts after superhero movies of today and cowboy movies of the sixties, the film sees Johnny Depp in the central role of Tonto, a Comanche warrior who befriends John Reid aka the Lone Ranger, played by Armie Hammer, as the two take on the military-industrial complex in Texas, 1869. The 2013 film adaptation of the popular fictional character The Lone Ranger is an odd duck in many ways.