Today in business slowly destroying art: The Lone Ranger no longer has supernatural coyotes

By Sean O'Neal | October 19, 2011 | 9:52pm

Aux Features Film

Due to the ugly ingress of drab business concerns into unfettered imagination, certain sacrifices had to be made in order to remake The Lone Ranger as a Johnny Depped spectacle—cuts that, to artists such as producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski, were as the severing of a limb, forcing them to hobble through the process of creation with a mere $215 million budget, instead of the $260 million required to dream as big as they could. Among the things that now have no place in The Lone Ranger, according to a Hollywood Reporter interview with Bruckheimer and also harsh, unfeeling reality: “We cut a sequence involving a coyote attack—supernatural coyotes—and a small animated segment.”

Bruckheimer puts a brave face on his loss, saying that they had “made some sacrifices creatively, but nothing that would hurt the film,” attempting to assuage the deadness that audiences will feel, awaiting a supernatural coyote attack that never arrives. Fortunately for him, The Lone Ranger has been bumped from its original December 2012 date—where it would have competed against the likes of The Hobbit and World War Z before a demanding holiday audience—to May 31, 2013, when the crowds, softened by the onset of summer, are somewhat more forgiving of smaller, more personal films that lack the supernatural coyotes they might otherwise expect.