The Lone Ranger bombed this weekend, grossing under $50 million over the five day Fourth of July "weekend." It was also hammered by critics, grabbing a 24 percent "fresh" rating from all Rotten Tomatoes critics and an amazingly low 11 percent fresh from top critics. Neither audiences nor critics were buying what director Gore Verbinski was selling.
I don’t want to focus on Verbinski here, though. I’m more interested in the output of The Lone Ranger’s star, Armie Hammer and the ways in which it compares to the work of another budding action star: Thor’s Chris Hemsworth. These two have weirdly mirrored each other over the last couple of years. Hollywood can learn something about what audiences want by comparing Hemsworth’s success to Hammer’s troubles.*
You may remember in the summer of 2012 there being a pair of Snow White re-imaginings. The first, Mirror Mirror, combined slapstick with lush costuming and fantastic (as in, fantasy-based) action sequences. It was over-the-top and heavily stylized, operating with an ironic wink. Hammer played the silliest character of all, reduced to panting like a dog after being charmed with a "puppy love" potion. The second, Snow White and the Huntsman, was a darker affair: it was angsty and brooding, and, perhaps most importantly, took itself seriously. Hemsworth played the titular Huntsman with a masculine, sober charm.
Mirror Mirror grossed $65M domestically and $166M worldwide. Snow White and the Huntsman, meanwhile, grossed $155M domestically and $397M worldwide. There is reportedly a sequel in the works set for 2015. It’s pretty clear which film audiences preferred.
Fast forward to this summer and the aforementioned tanking of The Lone Ranger. It is, of course, hard to say why audiences stayed away. Perhaps they listened to the critics, who complained about the film’s jarring shifts in tone, the way that Hammer and costar Johnny Depp engaged in slapstick and drenched the film in irony even as brutal violence soaked the screen. Perhaps they could tell from the relentless ad campaign that this was a jokey rendition of the beloved character. The Lone Ranger didn’t have the decency to take itself seriously: why should audiences?
Compare that to Thor. Hemsworth’s big break was a hit with audiences, grossing over $65M on opening weekend and almost $450M worldwide. Thor was by no means a dark, Nolanesque feature. It was, by turns, dramatic and humorous. But the humor came naturally. It never felt forced. It worked within the universe created by Kenneth Branagh. Again, importantly: The movie took itself seriously. Even if it wasn’t a "serious" film, audiences cared because the cast and crew respected the universe within which they were working.
(As an aside, you can see the same dynamic at work with White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen. The former was marketed as, essentially, a funny Olympus Has Fallen, with a black president telling a terrorist to keep his hands off his Jordans as the White House crumbles around him. It has tanked, grossing just $50M through its first two weekends on a $150M budget. Olympus Has Fallen, meanwhile, grossed almost $100M domestically and over $160M worldwide, despite having less starpower (Gerard Butler versus Channing Tatum/Jamie Foxx) and half the budget.)
The critical and commercial failure of The Lone Ranger has caused some consternation amongst those who dislike the fact that superhero films (and actioners in general) are taking themselves more seriously. For instance:
@mattzollerseitz I enjoyed Lone Ranger nearly as much as you. Do the 40-year-old superhero fanboys only want Nolan-esque doom "realism"?
— Jim Reedy (@jim_reedy) July 7, 2013
This was approvingly retweeted by Matt Zoller Seitz, the recently installed head of RogerEbert.com who, I think it would be fair to say, is concerned by the Nolanization of the action film, the elevation of the serious over the slapstick in genre cinema. I get what Reedy is going for in that tweet, but I think it misses the mark. It’s not doom and gloom audiences want, necessarily. Rather, audiences want actors and characters who treat their worlds with a modicum of weightiness despite how absurdly light and fluffy those worlds appear to those of us on the other side of the screen.
This doesn’t mean our artists should strive for humorlessness. Rather, they should strive to organically harness that humor in a way that makes sense for the film in question—think of the diner scene in Thor. When you try to wring laughs from Armie Hammer getting his head dragged through horseshit or Johnny Depp pulling a silly face for the camera or a horse standing in a tree for no reason or cannibalistic rabbits fighting over the flesh of their compatriots—all of which happen in The Lone Ranger—modern audiences simply aren’t going to respond.
*None of what follows should be construed as a criticism of Hammer, exactly. I've followed his career for some time and thought he was excellent in The Social Network. You should also check out his performance in Chandler Tuttle's 2081, an adaptation of the Vonnegut short story "Harrison Bergeron." You can rent it for just $1.99 at Amazon.com, a real steal.