10 Expensive Movies With Budgets That Spiralled Out Of Control

3. The Lone Ranger (2013)

The fact that The Lone Ranger was initially delayed due to budget concerns before a single frame had already been shot pretty much sums up the movie's main issue. Attempting to give the Western the same treatment that had worked so well for the pirate genre, director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer assembled another mega-budget summer blockbuster, hoping to recapture the box office glory of their previous collaborations. Production was initially halted after rumors that the project would end up costing $250m, a quite frankly ridiculous amount of money to spend on a Western. Despite reworking the budget in an effort to reduce costs, the movie still ended up costing a quarter of a billion dollars. Which should come as no surprise, given that Verbinski's refusal to rein in his excesses saw Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End cost a staggering $300m. Building fully-functional trains, shooting in six states and the massive amount of effects work required invariably pushed the cost of the movie back up towards the figures that had seen it delayed in the first place. It wouldn't have been so bad had The Lone Ranger enjoyed a fraction of the box office success of Pirates of the Caribbean, but the movie failed to even crack $100m domestically and ended up earning just $260m worldwide. Factoring in marketing and distribution costs, Disney took a financial loss of over $150m on the project which came as a surprise to very few people, as the extravagant and increasingly-expensive production had been predicted to disappoint ever since the massive budget was first announced.