Well, I think we all saw this one coming. After a disappointing opening weekend at the box office, Disney’s The Lone Ranger is officially being called the third high profile flop of the summer (After Earth and White House Down being the other two). The movie has made $73 million worldwide so far, which doesn’t sound that bad until you realize that the budget was over $215 million. That leaves a lot of ground to make up if they hope to even come close to being profitable, but with movies like Pacific Rim and The Wolverine on the horizon, that’s looking very unlikely. Analysts are now predicting that Disney will lose at least $150 million on the movie, and it could even come close to the disastrous $200 million loss inflicted by John Carter last year. Obviously this creative team has had plenty of success in the past with The Pirates of the Caribbean films, so where did they go wrong?

The big question here is whether the movie really needed to cost as much as it did. Although Disney did push Gore Verbinski and Jerry Bruckheimer to cut the budget back from $250 million, it is now apparent that even bigger cuts were required. Johnny Depp’s star power is also up for debate as it would seem that his appeal may be fading somewhat (last summer’s Dark Shadows was also a huge disappointment). Topping it all off, there is the question of whether or not modern audiences are all that interested in Westerns (True Grit and Django Unchained being the exception rather than the rule).

This all makes it look like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were on point with their recent prediction that huge flops will lead to the implosion of the movie industry. In the case of Disney, however, they should be just fine thanks to the insane success of Iron Man 3 and Monsters University earlier this summer. Essentially, as long as they still have Marvel and Pixar to rely on, they can continue to make expensive two-and-a-half hour Johnny Depp flicks ad nauseam for many years to come. Were you surprised by the failure of The Lone Ranger? Why do you think it bombed?