Hi NO, Silver--Depp Craters at the Box Office

 The mega-budget "The Lone Ranger" went down in a cloud of a dust in its box-office debut over the July 4 weekend, saddling the studio with a "John Carter"-sized disaster.

 Over the five-day holiday weekend, the masked rider will have brought in around $49 million. That's about $20 million under analysts' projections and nearly $90 million behind the total of the No. 1 movie, Universal and Illumination Entertainment's animated family film "Despicable Me 2."

 Worse, the $29.4 million three-day Friday-Sunday total for the $225 million adaptation of the classic radio and TV show, with Armie Hammer as the title character and Johnny Depp as Tonto, was weaker than that of last year's bomb "John Carter."

 That $250-million sci-fi adventure opened to $30.1 million, topped out at $73 million at the domestic box office and Disney wound up with a $200 million write down.

 It's hard to imagine Disney executives aren't questioning the decision they made last summer to restart production on the Western after having shut it down when the budget began spiraling out of control.

 "The Lone Ranger" marks the second consecutive major box-office misfire for Depp, who starred in last summer's "Dark Shadows." That send-up of a 1960s TV vampire soap cost $150 million to produce and topped out at $80 million. It opened to a mere $29 million -- and "The Lone Ranger" did worse than that.

 With Depp and the "Pirates of the Caribbean team of producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski on board, Disney had hoped "The Lone Ranger" could do for Westerns what that $3.7 billion four-film franchise had done for pirate movies....More