7. Don't Spend Sequel Money On The First Movie
If estimates from the Hollywood press are correct, then The Lone Ranger cost around $375 million to both produce and then market, and more scarily, they suggest that it would need to make around $800 million at the box office just to break even. Allow that figure to sink in for a moment, and then think about how broken that makes the Hollywood studio system seem. More to the point, if the film has cost close to $400 million in total, then there is clearly far too much money being spent on it; in fact, that's the sort of money you should only spend if you're making a sequel to a film that was box office gangbusters, say, a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. Take comparable blockbuster movies; Transformers cost $150 million to make, and only when it was a tremendous success did Michael Bay get $200 million for the sequel. Similarly, the Pirates sequels were given greater injections of cash when Disney were sure that they had a sound investment on their hands, but with The Lone Ranger, they have essentially budgeted it as another Pirates sequel and been quite poetically stung for their complacency.