It’s been a while since we’ve heard any news on Walt Disney’s attempt to bring the classic western hero the Lone Ranger to the big screen. We’ve long known that Johnny Depp has long been attached to the project as the Ranger’s sidekick Tonto and that producer Jerry Bruckheimer had brought in his Pirates Of The Caribbean scripting team of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio to write the screenplay. Now it looks like the group may be joined by another Pirates alum as Deadline is reporting that director Gore Verbinski is in talks to helm The Lone Ranger.
This will not be the first time that Depp and Verbinski will have worked together since the third Pirates movie hit screens in 2007. Depp recently supplied the voice of the title character for Verbinski’s debut outing as an animation director, Rango, due out later this year.
Bruckheimer has been having a bit of trouble getting The Lone Ranger going at Disney. Director Mike Newel was on the film for a while, but failed to get it in front of cameras. The biggest impediment to getting Lone Ranger into production is probably Depp himself, who has numerous projects in development that could get greenlit and push any potential start date for Lone Ranger back even further.
While I thought that the first Pirates movie from this group was great fun, I found the second and third to have more than a bit of the stick of cash-grab on them. Hopefully, they’ll be able to capture the same lightening in a bottle that they did before.
