• by Thom Forbes , August 7, 2013

Most of the critics bid “The Lone Ranger” a hearty “Hi-Yo, Away” when it opened earlier this summer and the movie-going public indeed stayed away in wagon trains despite the previously sure-fire attraction of Johnny Depp both as Tonto and a driving creative force. As a result, the Disney studio operation took an arrow to the midsection yesterday with the company mostly blaming marketing costs for the film for a likely $160 to $190 million write off.

The flop was tinseltown’s “third major disappointment” of the summer, the Hollywood Reporter’s Pamela McClintock reported last month, “after Will Smith tentpole “After Earth” and Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum’s “White House Down” -- both Sony pics.” 

Does this –- gasp –- portend the denouement of “tentpole” movies driven by what, in a more innocent time, were called matinee idols? 

“The flop of ‘The Lone Ranger’ seems to be final proof that movie audiences have grown fatigued with Johnny Depp shoehorning his trademark character actor eccentricities into big budget tentpole films,” entertainment and pop culture reporter Scott Huver told Fox411’s Pop Tarts reporter Hollie McCay. “What has happened is that the big franchise efforts have leaned too heavily on the basic appeal of Depp’s off-kilter approach freshening up mainstream fare and built too-flimsy structures around them.”

Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger addressed the sentiment directly yesterday.

“There has been a lot said, I know, about the risk of basically high-cost, tentpole films,” Iger said in a conference call with analysts covered by Reuters’ Lisa Richwine, “and we certainly can attest to that given what happened with ‘Lone Ranger.’ We still think the tentpole strategy is a good strategy,” he continued. “That one way to rise above the din and the competition is with a big film, not just big budget, but big story, big cast, big marketing behind it.”

Phew. That was close, wasn’t it?

Of course, there’s still hope, slim as it is, that the film will be a hit elsewhere. The movie is opening in England, Ireland and Scotland this weekend, for example.

“Industrial-scale mega-movies often look to foreign markets to indemnify themselves against domestic doldrums, but that hope appears wan in this case,” Hedrik Hertzberg wrote in his “defense” of the movie in the New Yorker last month. “Audiences in places like China don’t generally embrace Westerns with the same enthusiasm they lavish on alien invasions, sci-fi franchises, teen wizards, zombies, and superheroes, especially when the cowboys aren’t even in 3-D.”

Maybe it didn’t help that “The Lone Ranger” was “basically a comedy” with frequent and jarring “interludes of sadism, murder, and genocidal mass slaughter,” as Hertzberg points out. Or that for all the irony and iconery, the adolescent humor appeals to the memories of boys who “are eligible for Medicare.”

Don’t pull out the hankies for Disney in any event. The world’s largest entertainment and media company overall posted net income of $1.85 billion for the quarter that ended June 29, up 1% from a year earlier, according to the Los Angeles Times’ Daniel Miller, with revenue rising 4% to $11.58 billion. Shares closed at $67.05 yesterday, close to the all-time high of $67.89 set May 16. 

“We are pleased with the results we delivered in the third quarter,” Iger said in a statement. “We are confident that our strategy of creating high-quality branded content positions us well for the future.”

As they try to run up interest in the U.K. and Ireland this week, Depp and other principals clearly blame the sour reviews of American critics for the poor box office performance in the U.S., as Business Insider’s Kirsten Acuna reports. Yahoo, in fact, has a three-minute video compilation, “Lone Ranger Team Hit Back At Critics,” that includes producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s charge that “I think they were reviewing the budget, not reviewing the movie.”

Indeed, Forbes’ Scott Mendelson feels that the big mistake the studio made was to act as if the movie was already a franchise like “Pirates of the Caribbean” eventually became. “The legend… err, the lesson of ‘The Lone Ranger’ is: Don’t budget ‘The Lone Ranger’ as if it were ‘The Lone Ranger Rides Again,’” he wrote last month.

Says Depp, according to the Guardian’s Xan Brooks: “I think the reviews were written seven to eight months before we released the film. [The critics] had expectations that it must be a blockbuster. I don’t have any expectations of that. I never do.”

The bad reviews also fail to pierce Depp’s personal defenses. 

“The great Christopher Hitchens said that everyone in the world has a book inside them, and that’s exactly where it should stay,” he told the Independent’s Gill Pringle. “So people can critique and dissect but I know that I approached it in the right way. And that’s all I can do.”

Sometimes, a critic or two might respond, some movies should stay inside the minds of their creative forces, too.