Sunday, July 07, 2013

Who was that masked man?

Yes, return with us to those thrilling days of yesteryear when Disney knew how to make good movies. According to this post at Yahoo Movies, The Lone Ranger is going to be a flop of the John Carter variety.  Even though Johnny Depp may help bring in a little more money overseas, he has now been in two consecutive financial flops.  Dark Shadows was also a financial flop, although I personally thought it wasn't bad.  I mean, who can't relate to a vampire?  But back to the masked man...
It's hard to imagine Disney executives aren't questioning the decision they made last summer to restart production on the Western after having shut it down when the budget began spiraling out of control.
"The frustrating part for us," Disney's head of distribution Dave Hollis told TheWrap Sunday, "is that we had all the ingredients here. You take a classic franchise, team the world's most successful producer, an award-winning director and the biggest movie star in the world and you think your chances of success are pretty good. But we just didn't make it work."
Looking at John Carter and now The Lone Ranger, it seems that Disney doesn't know how to take a classic story and make a popular movie out of it.  Maybe the "franchises" they are trying to rework are best left alone.  There's something that Disney doesn't get, or maybe they don't have the right people to do it.  Having all the ingredients is no guarantee that the recipe will turn out well.  A Western movie is very risky to start with since it's audience is going to be heavily US based.  Despite having the world's most successful producer, etc, The Lone Ranger is not going to resonate with younger audiences.  People were listening to the masked man and Tonto on their radios in the 1940's.

By contrast, look at Snow White.  The story was based on a much earlier gothic horror tale that became a dark silent movie.  Disney, meaning mostly Walt himself, took that and made one of the most memorable movies of all time. Walt was inspired by the old Gothic stories and knew what to do with them.  Another example is Chernabog, a monster that was based on another early horror story. The Disney corporation really needs that kind of creative genius again.

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