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Monday, July 08, 2013

Just How Many Trains Did They Blow Up Making The Lone Ranger, Anyway?

Skimming across Yahoo News today, I discovered that the critic-reviled Lone Ranger is also a box office bomb. It cost $225M to make and has only brought in $49M so far.

A western costing $225M? How on Earth can it cost that much to film a bunch of guys riding around on horses? I knew they were blowing up lots of stuff and wrecking trains, but $225M? And how would like to have been in their production meetings where the ever-growing budget was revealed to the executives at Disney? I'm sure they knew that a western could never recoup the piles of cash being incinerated to make the thing.

Ouch.


Fantastic production values and lots of trains being smashed equals hundreds of millions of dollars.

5 comments:

  1. Jedi Master Ivyan6:48 AM

    I lost any interest in seeing the movie when I saw Johnny Depp was playing Tonto. "What's the matter, they couldn't find a Native American to play the role???" It doesn't help that no one has heard of Armie Hammer. Isn't that what you put into the fridge to cut down on smells?

    I just took a peek, Ender's Game, which is a sci-fi action flick cost a little over $100 mil to make.

    I think they were trying to make a blockbuster and forgot to make a good movie. I'll just watch Tombstone again, rather than this garbage. Now that's a Western.

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  2. That's an insane amount of money!

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  3. Let's see, it cost $750,000 for Buster Keaton to smash up a locomotive in 1926. Adjusting for inflation brings that to about $10 million in 2013 dollars. So, on their budget of $225 million, that means the Lone Ranger could have smashed or blown up 22 trains, in a 149 minute movie. That's one train every 6.6 minutes.

    From the sound of things, a movie of nothing but trains crashing, blowing up, going over cliffs, or otherwise being destroyed every 6.6 minutes might actually have turned out to be a better movie.

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  4. Whoops, I screwed up the link to "The General". It should have been

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_%281926_film%29

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  5. Trains being smashed to bits in interesting ways for 149 minutes? I'd see that!

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