The 2013 film adaptation of popular fictional character The Lone Ranger is a duck in many ways. Inspired in equal parts of movies superhero of today and movies cowboy 60s, the film sees Johnny Depp in the central role of Tonto, a Comanche warrior who befriends John Reid aka The Lone Ranger, played by Armie Hammer, as the two take on the Texas Military Industrial Complex, 1869. In an interview with Collider, The Lone Ranger director Gore Verbinski confirmed rumors that the film was due to Originally feature a werewolf character before taking the story in a new direction.
“I made Rango. He came back about four years later, where [producer] Jerry [Bruckheimer] had said, “Do you want to come back? I said, “Well, I would like to do the version I originally thought of. Somewhere in between, without me involved, there was a werewolf, that’s where the werewolf thing came from. But I never read this draft … So it was in another cul-de-sac. It was not part of my world at all. Then by the time he came back… I think they had exhausted the other way. It was Johnny who called me and said, ‘Can you come back?’ And he sent me a picture of him in Tonto makeup and the bird on his head. And then I pitched my original idea to Justin Haythe, and we just started working on the script. ”
While a werewolf feels like a weird addition to the world of The Lone Ranger, which has always been rooted in reality and the cowboy movies in their prime rather than comics, a trace of the supernatural creature was part of the finished film. An outlaw character named Butch Cavendish turns out to be a cannibal, whom Tonto frequently calls a “Wendigo,” an evil spirit that feeds on human flesh. It’s possible that Cavendish was at one point a full-fledged werewolf before Verbinski stepped in.
Instead of bringing in supernatural elements, the filmmaker has instead chosen to tell the story of a changing world, where Tonto and The Lone Ranger realize they are relics of a bygone era.
“This idea that the future is coming, whether it is the railroad, whether it is the East India Trading Company, it is there in Rango, the inevitability of the future and what happens to the gunslinger or the Captain. Jack or one of those characters when they are faced with progress. And because of Tonto’s perspective, it’s blatantly in The Lone Ranger. When these guys in the ’60s and early’ 70s started to play with the genre and go, what happens to the guy on the horse when the carcome? what fascinates me, this collapse of a bubble, a balloon or a system of beliefs. I think it’s really when you are forced to look at things differently. And this is where everything changes for you. You turn everything upside down, you see, is when a kid sees the eraser under the table. Basically it’s a different point of view… ”
Despite Verbinski’s experienced hand and Depp’s star power, The Lone Ranger has been plagued by bad reviews, criticism of Depp playing a Comanche character, and the film sank at the box office, killing the franchise. nascent before it can start properly. Source: Collider.
