The Lone Ranger riding behind schedule and over budget?

Despite the fact that Disney has already halted production on their big screen adaptation of The Lone Ranger once last year amid budgetary concerns, it seems that director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer are yet to learn their lesson. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the budget for the Johnny Depp / Armie Hammer team-up has once again spiralled to $250m (it had previously been trimmed to $125m back in August to resolve the previous dispute), and the production is apparently “days or possibly weeks behind its 120-day shooting schedule” due to severe weather disruptions.

With the budget ballooning, the project is facing an additional set of rewrites to help keep costs down, with an ‘insider’ quoted as stating: “It’s out of control…but if you were going to bet on anyone, it would be on Gore, Johnny and Jerry.” The trio have of course made plenty of box-office bucks for Disney, with the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy banking close to $2.7 billion for the studio, while executives who have seen early footage from the film are said to believe that “Verbinski has a chance to do for Westerns what he did for pirate movies – make the genre popular internationally.”

Verbinski and Depp have previous experience in the Western genre with the Academy Award-winning CG-animated feature Rango, but despite its Oscar success, Rango earned just $245m from a budget of $135m, while Depp’s most recent Tim Burton collaboration, Dark Shadows, also failed to set the box-office on fire. Westerns meanwhile are a notoriously hard sell (Heaven’s Gate, anyone?), and although Disney are flush with cash off the back of Marvel’s The Avengers, there must surely be some concerns within the studio that they could have another John Carter on their hands when The Lone Ranger rides into cinemas on July 3rd, 2013.