Lone Ranger a $160M Loss for Disney

Who was that masked man, anyway? Perhaps it would have been better if Disney never found out. The company yesterday announced it has projected it will lose $160 million to $190 million on flop The Lone Ranger, which earned just $29 million in the US and Canada in its opening weekend (you may or may not recall it was absolutely slaughtered by Despicable Me 2), the BBC reports. Disney's CEO acknowledged that "high-cost, tent-pole films" were a risk, but that the company still believes "the tent-pole strategy is a good strategy," Reuters reports.

But others involved in the film have been less conciliatory in their response to the news, blaming critics for the box office failure, the Guardian reports. "I think the reviews were written seven to eight months before we released the film," says star Johnny Depp. "[The critics] had expectations that it must be a blockbuster. I don't have any expectations of that. I never do." "I think they were reviewing the budget, not reviewing the movie," says producer Jerry Bruckheimer. (That budget was $225 million, by the way.) Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers offered an alternative explanation. "Why is The Lone Ranger such a huge flop at the box office?" he says. "Because the movie sucks, that's why." (More The Lone Ranger stories.)