The Final ‘Lone Ranger Box’ Office Numbers: Western values upheld through Disney’s ‘Star Wars’
The worldwide total box office take for Disney’s The Lone Ranger was $239,131,00 which is respectable. It was hardly the box office flop that the entertainment industry has attempted to project it to be. I felt that The Lone Ranger deserved a bit of defense because it was a hack of a good movie. I heavily promoted it, I loved the film, and I am sure that when it hits the home theater market, it will do excessively well. Disney spent the enormous sum of $215 million on the production of the modern western plus many tens of millions on advertising hoping the picture would bring in a billion dollars as a summertime blockbuster. But the money wasn’t there. By the time the summer box office market hit the Fourth of July, movie goers had already spent their money on superhero pictures like Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel. Money was still spent on children’s films like Monster’s U and Disney’s Planes, but for the most part, movie audiences had run out of money leaving many studio films to fail at the box office. But when it came to The Lone Ranger, there was a hatred from the entertainment community that caused them to even turn against Johnny Depp, which I found fascinating, and I know exactly why. A good portion of the why is seen in a totally unrelated Blaze Television piece that Glenn Beck did about his experiences on a real western ranch. The entertainment community in Hollywood’s Wilshire Blvd and Broadway in New York has grown to despise the “flyover states” and Glenn Beck is part of that New York culture which is where he made his fame and fortune. But wisely, he has moved away in search for truth and discovered the America that the rest of us already know about, and he is touched by the results.
The Lone Ranger as a Disney film was about these good ol’ fashioned attributes of self-reliance and rugged individualism. The movie will be looked back upon as a success as it will become a fan favorite in the years to come once it gets away from the entertainment machine that is rooted in progressive political causes. The Lone Ranger was in fact too good for the modern film community. They did not want it to do well because they didn’t want to have to compete against it with future remakes and copy-cat attempts by other studios. Modern progressives do not want to revisit the era of the American western. They do not want western values to exist in American culture for many of the reasons Glenn Beck uttered in his short video clip above.
The movie business is changing dramatically, and industry insiders know it will not be to their advantage. They resent Disney as a family film studio and the amount of money they generate. Disney thankfully holds the rights to Marvel Comics, Pixar, their own slate of family programming and now the massive franchise of Star Wars which I’m going to state emphatically is set to change the world with “western values.” Star Wars is a modern western. George Lucas made Star Wars in the spirit of the old Saturday morning serials that made The Lone Ranger so popular and there is little that the world can do at this point to stop the explosion of Star Wars that is about to burst upon the world. Movie studios attempting fixed progressive social messages can see that Disney is positioned to get the “family friendly” message out to the flyover states for the next 20 years while they collapse under the weight of competition.
That competition is driven by union labor. The cost to make movies is too high because labor demands are too ridiculously over-rated and most studios cannot make films that will garner over $500 million in worldwide market sales which is what it takes to cover modern production costs. So many studios will drown within the next decade because they will have to produce more comedies, more chick flicks, and more small pictures that are not so effects driven, because during the summer of 2013, many of them took a bath that they drowned in. The impact of 2013 won’t be seen until 2015. In that year, Disney will become the most dominant film studio in entertainment as the rest of the entertainment establishment reels. Other studios will have to file for bankruptcy. They will not be able to compete.
Disney has their own internal marketing machine, their own amusement park revenue, and they own ABC, ESPN and many other media outlets, so they can afford to have the rest of the industry turn their back on them, which they did when The Lone Ranger was released. Critics went after the film more for the power that Disney had, than because the film was bad. The industry wanted to see Disney fail because they know what’s coming, and they resent the filmmaker Jerry Bruckheimer openly naming himself a conservative while he was promoting The Lone Ranger. That is where the real hatred for The Lone Ranger filmmakers and the film itself stemmed from. Disney is not making movies for the Los Angeles and New York markets, but for the other 48 states that are the “flyovers.”
When Star Wars hits the release phase, Lucasfilm under the protection of Disney is going to produce the most intense schedule of family programming ever seen in the motion picture, and television industry. I have read just about every Star Wars novel, and I can report that there is so much wealth in that story line that literature has never seen anything like it. When that material becomes television shows, cartoons on the Disney Channel, more novels, more movies, more video games, entertainment will be changed forever. And Star Wars is not a progressive production—it is traditional in the way that The Lone Ranger was a western set in the desert during a historical past; Star Wars is a western set in the distant past in deep space.
When it is wondered what the Huffington Post and Glenn Beck have in common, it is Star Wars. The Huffington Post covers every move of the Star Wars production with keen interest and if anybody has read any books by Glenn Beck Star Wars references are common, especially in his novel The Overton Window. When Star Wars hits theaters in the winter of 2015 after Avengers Two dominates the summer box office the world will change in entertainment. A new bar will be set, and many studios will collapse under the pressure. They know this instinctively and they took out their frustration on The Lone Ranger.
In the end, The Lone Ranger will get the last laugh. It will not be a financial loss for the Disney studio as it will easily cover its marketing budget with home sales on Blu Ray. But more than that, The Lone Ranger is one of the many influences of Star Wars. The values of The Lone Ranger are the values of Jaina Solo who will be the star of the next Star Wars film. She will go down in history as the strongest female protagonist in any movie at any point in time, and Disney will be the studio that can take credit for it. Disney will not need the New York and Los Angeles media in their court. They will have the “fly over states” and a very hungry international market that is poised to consume the intensely “western” values of Star Wars which will eclipse everything else produced by all other studios. In the end, The Lone Ranger produced by the Disney Company will ride off into the sunset knowing the part it played in the creation. Critics attacked The Lone Ranger not because it was a bad movie, but because of the values it articulated. But even their parade of insults did not prevent the film from doing respectable business. For Disney however, the best is yet to come, and for those who were afraid of The Lone Ranger, wait till the impact of the new generation of Star Wars hits a youth that is so hungry for heroes that they can think of little else. The emotional void left by our modern progressive society will fill quickly with values that were born in the American western.
And no group of progressives, Fabian socialists, or open communists will be able to stop it this time……………………………………….
The western is back. But this time the horse will be replaced by space ships, the gun and the whip by the lightsaber of Jaina Solo.
Rich Hoffman
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