Having never seen the original TV show or heard any of the original radio broadcasts, I didn’t know what to expect from Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger. The film stars Johnny Depp as Native American Spirit Warrior, Tonto, who must join forces with John Reid (Armie Hammer), to battle the evil that is fueled by greed and corruption. So after all the delays, script rewrites, and reworking the budget, we finally got our first look at The Lone Ranger.

Check out the first trailer for the film here below.

A director interpreting a property that looks radically different from the original is nothing new. But for those who were worried about all the problems that affected this film, it looks like this trailer should put their nerves at ease.

If you have been following the progress of Gore Verbinski‘s adaptation of The Lone Ranger, you know of the difficulties it took for them to even get the cameras rolling. Pricey deals, a large budget, complications with the script, and big money already spent on John Carter (which didn’t end well) and Oz: The Great and Powerful – all of these things were contributing factors that led to Disney’s decision to halt the production of The Lone Ranger.

At first The Lone Ranger was budgeted at $250 million, which is quite large considering the film is a western. But once things were scaled down to $215 million – apparently CGI werewolves were taken out of the picture to reduce the budget of the film – the script was rewritten, and deals were reworked, the ball started rolling again, and production on the film finally started.

Now comes word that problems are arising once more, and the budget that was scaled down to $215, has once again inflated to what it started at in the beginning, a whooping $250 million. Also, mother nature is becoming a huge production problem. So much of a problem that production is behind schedule.

Dark Shadows
Directed By: Tim Burton
Written By: Seth Grahame-Smith
Starring: Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer, Chloë Moretz, Helena Bonham Carter, Jonny Lee Miller, Jackie Earle Haley, Bella Heathcote, Christopher Lee and Alice Cooper
Distributed By: Warner Bros. Pictures
Rated: PG-13
Release Date: May 11, 2012

“His name was Barnabas Collins, and he was the finest man this family ever knew.”

With its unique blend of gothic intrigue, romance, and melodrama, Dark Shadows staked the soap opera status quo in the heart in the late 1960s. The series, which ran from 1966-1971, was unprecedented in daytime television for its supernatural stories filled with vampires, ghosts, witches, werewolves, and the occasional zombie or warlock. My mother would race home from high school to watch Dark Shadows, hypnotized into submission by Barnabus Collins (Jonathan Frid), 18th-century vampire and master of Collinwood Manor. With its blood-and-thunder performances and atmospheric interiors, Dark Shadows became a pop culture phenomena with 1,225 television episodes and numerous films, novels, comics, and audio dramas dedicated to the Collins family.

For those dying to revisit the creaky, cobwebbed halls of Collinwood Manor, director Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood) has resurrected Dark Shadows as a 113-minute gothic comedy, written by New York Times best-selling novelist Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter).

The release last month of the first image of Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer in character from next summer’s big-budget western adventure The Lone Ranger didn’t particularly set the world on fire. One of the major question marks surrounding the troubled production was how Depp would look as the Ranger’s faithful Indian companion Tonto. In the months before the release of the first Pirates of the Caribbean, images of Depp in character as Captain Jack Sparrow led skeptics to believe the eclectic actor had gone off the deep end and the movie would be an epic bomb for Disney.

Instead Pirates was a blockbuster smash that finally made Depp a bona fide movie star and spawned a billion-dollar franchise for the Mouse House. It also established the quirky and roguish Captain Jack as the first iconic movie hero of the 21st century. Pretty soon the stylish swashbuckler would become a popular Halloween costume as well. Depp had taken an unusual approach in his ideas for the character’s look, much to the consternation of studio executives already sweating over the movie’s gargantuan (for 2002/3) budget and the nagging uncertainty of a pirate movie, much less one based on one of their famous theme park rides, but the gamble paid off handsomely.

The first official image from next summer’s The Lone Ranger has been released, featuring stars Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp as the classic re-imagined western heroes the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

You can check out the image here below.

The Lone Ranger reunites Depp with the Pirates of the Caribbean team of director Gore Verbinski, writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer.