10 Movies With INSANE Budgets (That Didn't Pay Off)
2. The Lone Ranger
The Lone Ranger was one of those movies that a lot of people believed wouldn't work while it was still in development. One of the biggest issues centered around the casting of Johnny Depp in the role of Tonto. That wasn't a dig on the actor's talent, but rather on the fact that he's Caucasian and he probably shouldn't have played a Native American.
Despite the whitewashing, which has been a problem in Hollywood pretty much since forever, the movie failed for a number of reasons. One of the biggest was its ridiculous budget, which came in at a stunning $250 million with an additional $150 million in production costs.
That's a total cost of $400 million dollars, which shadowed the comparatively low box office take of $260 million. The loss to the studio was staggering, and it was due to the horribly inflated budget. Part of that had to do with Depp's salary, which was $20 million, but that was hardly the only thing that inflated the cost of the film.
Production delays, problems on set, and other issues kept increasing the cost of the film from its initial budget of $70 million to more than three times that amount. It also didn't help that critically, the movie didn't manage to impress many people, which led to a Rotten Tomatoes score of 31%.