By now, we’ve pretty much all seen this still from the Jerry Bruckheimer/Gore Verbinski remake of The Lone Ranger – the dashing Armie Hammer as the titular character and Johnny Depp as Tonto in a dead bird hat. And it might be all we see for a while.

Before it even began filming, Ranger had already experienced its fair share of issues and was reportedly shut down due to a soaring budget. Disney had just learned the hard way that big budget doesn’t equal big box office – with the very expensive flop John Carter. But Bruckheimer and Verbinski agreed to make some cuts, reducing the budget down to a measly $215 million. The green light was back on.

Several weeks into filming, things have not been going so well. For starters, it’s ballooned back up to its original $250 million budget and is apparently running weeks behind schedule. True, some of that can be attributed to poor weather conditions and wicked dust storms that damaged the set. But it should be mentioned that the set consisted of very expensive old timey trains that Verbinski wanted created from scratch. The film is also experiencing a good amount of script rewrites which, depending on which blog sites you read, is either normal or ridiculous.

The film isn’t due out until July 2013, so there is plenty of time to pull the plug on the director and find someone who can get this done for less. But that is highly unlikely, as Verbinski has the Johnny Depp Seal of Approval. Verbinski worked with Depp on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies as well as Rango (awesome) and Johnny is nothing if not loyal to his directors. Plus, Disney is likely holding out hope that Verbinski will do for westerns what he did for pirate movies – make them cool again.

Since they can’t bag the director, and they probably don’t want the bad press of another movie’s death-by-budget, they’ll probably carry on and hope it all works out. After all, despite flaws that the public generally wouldn’t know about anyway, The Lone Ranger has a good cast – Depp, Armie Hammer (I love him and his name), William Fincher, Helena Bonham Carter – a talented director, a talented producer, a talented writer. Good movies have been made with less. Or bad movies made with more. Whichever one makes more sense.

Until next time, high-ho Silver, away….