The $250m flop Robert Duvall hated watching: “I just thought it was a bad movie”
If you want to ask an actor their opinions about which films are good and which are not, then you could do a lot worse than asking one who has been in the business for pretty much longer than anyone else, namely Robert Duvall.
Now 95 years young, Duvall’s career spanned seven decades and saw him collect an Oscar, four Golden Globes, a Bafta and two Emmys, with a movie list that ranks alongside almost anyone who ever did it: Both the good Godfathers, Apocalypse Now, Network, Bullitt, even To Kill a Mockingbird as far back as 1962.
So the man knows a thing or two about what makes a quality movie and what makes one that should be banished to the very bottom of a lengthy Netflix scroll. One such film that Duvall is not a fan of is a 2013 action-western starring Johnny Depp that has, quite rightly, been completely forgotten about by pretty much everyone, possibly even the people who were in it.
The Lone Ranger was a peculiar mix of the old and the new, but possibly the strangest thing about it was its eye-watering production budget of a staggering $250million, an amount that you wonder how on earth they managed to spend let alone got approved, and given the considerable issues experienced almost right from the off, it might well have been a better idea not to bother at all.
As Duvall said back in 2013, just after the film’s release: “It’s easier to raise $100 million (for a film) than $5 million. Doing an independent film is very difficult and they still do good work. But they do these big movies like The Lone Ranger. I mean, I just thought it was a bad movie.”
The Lone Ranger’s shoot was a disaster, to put it mildly. Problems went from bad to worse, as the crew battled against terrible weather, wildfires, an outbreak of chicken pox and then, tragically, the death of one of their own, a water safety expert who drowned inside a large water tank on set. There were also problems with the extremely costly special effects; Industrial Light and Magic produced a scene of the Golden Gate Bridge under construction in 1936, despite the film’s opening being set three years earlier.
The release of the film, mostly thanks to the production setbacks, was then repeatedly delayed, eventually for almost two years, and when it came out, the results were shockingly poor. It reportedly lost Disney some $150m at a conservative estimate.
Duvall, meanwhile, the same year released a western of his own, albeit one with a budget a fraction of that of The Lone Ranger, called A Night in Old Mexico. While not one of his best films, it fared better with audiences than critics. The following year, 2014, Duvall produced a late career highlight and one of his most memorable recent roles in The Judge alongside Robert Downey Jr and Billy Bob Thornton.
The legal drama earned him a string of award nominations for his performance, including an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a SAG and a Critics’ Choice. As he got older, the number of films Duvall made understandably tailed off, although he did appear in Steve McQueen’s Widows in 2018 and the Christian Bale period thriller The Pale Blue Eye in 2022.
