The Movie Disney Wants You to Forget

Disney is among one of the biggest, most successful companies on Earth. For over a century now they have been providing the world with entertainment in the fields of both animation and live-action. You'd be hard pressed to find someone isn't a fan of at least one of the company's properties, from Pixar to Marvel to Star Wars. But even if you're a die-hard fan of the Walt Disney Company, it's probably been a long while since you've heard the name: The Lone Ranger, and that's exactly how the studio wants it. So let's look back at the Oscar-nominated film that Disney wants you to forget exists.

When a studio has been operating for as long as Disney, there's bound to be more than a few poorly-aged projects. The company is no stranger to damage control, several films like Dumbo, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp have gotten stamped with disclaimers, warning audiences of offensive scenes that have not stood the test of time. But it doesn't end with just a few bad scenes, Disney has tried and succeeded at burying entire movies due to racist ideologies. 1946's Song of the South is probably the most infamous film in Disney's catalogue, and you'll have to do some real digging to find it online. Disney scrubbed the last trace of it from public knowledge when they re-themed the Splash Mountain ride at Walt Disney World from Song of the South to The Princess and the Frog.

While Song of the South is a horribly racist film with horrible depictions of Black people, at least the film can hide behind the fact that it was made in 1946. Disney actually made a similar, equally racist film as recently as 2013, with a cast full of A-list actors and a gigantic budget of $250 million. It stands as one of the few films in the studio's catalogue that cannot be found on Disney+.

The Lone Ranger is a 2013 western action film directed by Gore Verbinski, the filmmaker behind Rango. It is based on the television series of the same name that ran on ABC from 1949-1957. It tells a run-of-the-mill western action story where cowboy, The Lone Ranger and his companion, Tonto enact vigilante justice across Texas in 1869.

The film had a stacked cast of actors like Armie Hammer, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Tom Wilkinson. But while the cast list may have been the film's biggest selling-point, it's also exactly what led to its downfall...

Disney put a lot of faith behind their adaptation of The Lone Ranger. With a budget of a quarter of a billion dollars and Johnny Depp in a leading role, they were expecting a lot of success from their latest project. Up until that point it was the 2nd most expensive film Disney ever made behind 2010's Tangled, which only cost $10 million more.

But when The Lone Ranger hit theaters in the summer of 2013, it made much less of an impact than Disney had hoped. Over the course of its theatrical run, it only grossed a total of $260.5 million. For any other film this would be a triumph, but that has barely more than the budget, and a film typically needs to gross double its budget to be considered successful. The Lone Ranger ended up being the biggest box-office bomb of 2013. As an absolute titan of the industry, Disney rarely ever fails at the box office, so when it does, people tend to notice.

But a film's value has nothing to do with how much money it makes. Plenty of great films have done poorly at the box office and gone on to become classics. Unfortunately, this was not the case for The Lone Ranger. The film currently holds a score of 31% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 37/100 on Metacritic. It ended up taking home the award for "Worst Prequel. Remake, Rip-off or Sequel" at the 34th Golden Raspberry Awards. At the same time, it was also nominated for the Academy Awards in both VFX and Hair & Makeup, making The Lone Ranger one of the few films that has been nominated for the Oscars and the Razzies simultaneously.

Not only was the film a critical and financial failure for Disney, it was an embarrassment for the company that not even the Oscar nods could salvage. And it has only gotten worse with age, especially when it comes to the casting.

It's no secret that in the past couple of years, the reputations of both Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp have been severely tarnished by controversy. Johnny Depp has not been in a successful film in years, partially due to his abuse allegations, and Armie Hammer may very well never find work again after being accused of literal eating people. It's similar to how Edgar Wright's Baby Driver has been slightly damaged by the outside behavior of Ansel Elgort and Kevin Spacey, but at least Baby Driver was a good movie to begin with, The Lone Ranger does not have that safety net.

But it's not just the cast that's aged poorly, but the characters they play as well, specifically Johnny Depp as Tonto. Tonto is quite possibly the most famous Native American character in media, yet he is not played by a Native American actor. Depp has stated on multiple occasions that he has possible indigenous ancestry, but this has never been confirmed, leading to him being one of the most famous examples of a "Pretendian;" a non-native person who claims indigenous ancestry. Even if Johnny Depp does have some indigenous heritage, it's not nearly enough to justify him playing a full-blooded Comanche man. In addition to the poor casting choice, Tonto is a pretty stereotypical depiction of a Native American. He's stoic, wears warpaint and little clothing, and is constantly trying to feed the dead bird on his head. At the beginning of the film where Tonto is pretending to be a museum statue, he is labeled as "the noble savage."

Non-native people playing Native roles is nothing new, but Disney had the opportunity here to launch the career of a young indigenous actor and chose to go with Johnny Depp. Depp would later be nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award for "Worst Actor."

Even as someone who saw The Lone Ranger in theaters, and have fond memories of playing the characters in Disney Infinity with my brother, I completely forgot about the film's existence in recent years...and that's no accident. There hasn't been a mere mention of this film on any Disney platforms since its release, and as previously stated, it is one of the few Disney films that cannot be found on the company's streaming service. The Lone Ranger is a black mark on Disney's rap sheet that the studio is more than happy to bury the film so that it never sees the light of day again.