‘The Lone Ranger:’ Will dredging up dead genres continue to pay off for Disney?

You’ve got to hand it to Walt Disney Pictures. They took what was basically an extinct genre – the pirate movie – and spun the multi-billion dollar “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise out of it. Take that, “Cutthroat Island”!

The House of Mouse is hoping to continue that lucrative trend of genre resurrection with “Pirates” director Gore Verbinski’s latest offering “The Lone Ranger,” a theme park-like Western grab bag starring Armie Hammer as the titular hero and -- you guessed it -- Johnny Depp as his Native American partner Tonto.

Thanks to TV shows like “The Lone Ranger,” movie stars like John Wayne, and directors like John Ford, the Western was once a staple of Hollywood. But the genre fell out of favour with audiences in the 1970s and '80s and has never really recovered. Aside from rare exceptions like Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning genre post-mortem “Unforgiven” and Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti-spattered throwback exercise “Django Unchained,” the Western is all but dead in Hollywood as a viable money-maker – just ask “Cowboys & Aliens” director Jon Favreau.

However, despite the Western’s spotty record at the box office in recent years, Disney is banking on Verbinski’s successful “Pirates” formula to help get things back on track. Much like the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films were love letters to the swashbuckling days of cinema yore -- wrapped in the trappings of a modern blockbuster -- so, too, is “The Lone Ranger” a tribute to the Hollywood hey-day of tough guys and six shooters – bookended by the over-the-top action elements that modern audiences have come to expect, of course.

It’s not entirely clear if this formula will work again for “The Lone Ranger,” but moviegoers have proven time and time again, almost without exception, that they will turn out to see Depp play a wacky character in a $100-million-plus movie.

Dredging up a mostly dead genre like the Western or the pirate movie does carry risks, though – risks that Disney knows all too well. The studio’s $250 million pulp science fiction adventure “John Carter” was one of the biggest disasters of 2012, tanking at North American cinemas and barely earning back its bloated budget. Based on Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs' seminal pulp sci-fi novels, "John Carter" had all the makings of a blockbuster, but failed to entice audiences. Some blamed little-known Canadian leading man Taylor Kitsch for the film's failure, while others pointed to the movie's hokey and old fashioned source material. Will "Lone Ranger" -- based on similarly corny material -- suffer the same fate as "John Carter"?

Early reviews for the film are, for lack of a better term, not so great. Most critics have praised stars Hammer and Depp, but are calling the rest of the film an overblown, overlong mess of a movie. To be fair though, those same critics had similar things to say about 2011’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” – a film that went on to make over $1 billion at the box office worldwide. Industry insiders seem to think “Lone Ranger” is on track for a fairly decent opening weekend and believe it will perform well abroad thanks to Depp’s star power.

The real lesson here seems to be that if you’re planning to dust off an old Hollywood genre, you’d better make darn sure that Johnny Depp is your star.