by Ken B.
For context: http://t.co/9tWLIS1ov1
Over the past few weeks, everyone has added their theories on why The Lone Ranger failed at the box office. I’ll try to drop in mine now:
It’s not the critics. People who see mega-blockbusters on a regular basis probably don’t read reviews or care about critical consensus. While the negative reception may have had something to do with it, I can’t see it being more than a small percentage of the loss.
Hammer, Depp, Verbinski, and Bruckheimer appear to be overlooking the obvious: there wasn’t a lot of public interest in a $225 million movie based on The Lone Ranger. I think Hammer mentioned “World War Z” in an interview, saying that critics also tried to shut the movie’s box office down but failing. World War Z is a popular book and people went out to see it because of that reason. (Also, “World War Z” has a 67% on RT. How is that even remotely close to 27?)
Christopher Null once noticed that Hollywood will laugh at critics if a panned movie succeeds financially, and blame them if it fails (some of the stuff said almost matches word for word the page in Null’s book where he describes this phenomenon). Here is the latest example, and we’ll see many more.
The Reviews 