1. Its Budget Was Sky High
Almost any reason you can think of for why The Lone Ranger flopped falls back to one overriding factor: Disney put far too much money into it. Which means that it would always be a financial bomb unless it miraculously turned out to be box office gold and started making Avengers kind of money. The Lone Ranger's production budget was $250 million with an estimated extra $100 million in marketing costs. And since a varying percentage of a film's box office gross goes to the cinemas that show it, The Lone Ranger needs to gross an obscene amount of money worldwide just to break even. It's only a month into its box office run and has grossed just under $85 million in its first three weeks. For a cheaper film, this wouldn't be too bad but after costs of $350 million, it's not a good start. As a point of comparison, let's look at Star Wars Episode 3. It's a sci-fi epic that contained 2,200 visual effects shots and a final duel sequence that took over 70,000 man hours to create 49 seconds of, and it still cost less than half of what The Lone Ranger did with an estimated production budget of $113,000,000. In fact, (assuming IMDB's budget estimates for the Star Wars prequels are correct) Star Wars Episodes 2 and 3 combined cost less than The Lone Ranger. As Forbes Magazine put it, Disney spent the kind of money on The Lone Ranger that should be spent on a sequel instead of a potential franchise starter. A much more reasonable budget for a film that was the start of a new film franchise would have been somewhere between $100 million and $150 million. That way you're still splashing enough cash to realise a large scale story but at the same time you're hedging your bets and keeping potential losses low. If Disney had had the foresight to be more conservative with their money and The Lone Ranger's budget had been considerably lower, it wouldn't have been such a huge gamble and such an embarrassing and costly loss could have been lessened or even avoided entirely. But as we know, this didn't happen and Disney are now facing the consequences. Even if, for such an enormous company, a loss of $200 million is barely a drop in the bucket.