2. The Lone Ranger (2013) Budget: $225m/Total Gross: $260m
It seems that producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski will need to reign in the excesses that blighted the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies after this bloated, overcooked mess of a movie became the most high-profile flop of 2013, potentially causing a $150m write-down for Disney in the process. Despite the fact that fantasy-tinged westerns such as Jonah Hex, Cowboys and Aliens and Wild Wild West have all underperformed at the box office in recent years, how somebody still found it a wise idea to spend $225m on a movie that was previously best known as a 1950's television series in a genre that has very little international appeal is more than a tad perplexing. The Lone Ranger isn't as awful as some reviews have made it out to be; it is beautifully shot, Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp have great chemistry as the two leads and the action sequences are as spectacular as we've come to expect from the creative minds behind the Pirates franchise. However, the movie is at least forty minutes too long, features a framing device that frequently stops the narrative dead, and is so wildly uneven in tone that it glosses over the slaughter of Native Americans and the fact that the villain eats people's hearts in favor of slapstick comedy and lowbrow humor.
The latest in a string of high-profile disappointments for Jerry Bruckheimer that has ultimately brought an end to his partnership with Disney, The Lone Ranger is everything that is wrong with modern blockbuster filmmaking; a monstrously expensive misfire that forgoes story and narrative coherence in favor of sheer scale, proving that bigger does not equal better. Nobody should ever spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a Western but they did, and it should at least have been better than this.