Jerry Bruckheimer is one of the most successful producers in Hollywood history. His track record includes Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, The Rock, Armageddon, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and many other huge blockbusters. (Not to mention he reinvented himself with CSI on television.) But Bruckheimer’s hit a cold streak lately, and after many years of hits, he’s lost his deal with Disney.
Three words can pretty sum up why his long-term deal fell apart: The Lone Ranger. The film was an enormous flop that was pretty much doomed from the get-go, and it’s in the John Carter league of box office duds. After the movie went down the sh*tter, reports went around that Bruckheimer could lose his final cut privileges on the next Pirates movie. Then the next Pirates installment was put on hold over budget and script issues.
Not long after this, Jerry and the Mouse House decided to call it a day. While Jerry’s had an amazing track record, as reports on his exit reminded us, he’s also had a number of flops in recent years, like Prince of Persia, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and G-Force, the animated gerbil movie.
A report in the L.A. Times claims that it wasn’t so much the disaster of Lone Ranger that sealed his doom, but that Disney is moving in a different direction with Marvel and the Star Wars movies, and the Bruckheimer brand doesn’t fit in with where the company is headed in the future.
Bruckheimer’s been able to reinvent himself a number of times, and he’s had a remarkable track record in Hollywood that’s spanned decades. Whether he can pull the box office magic out of a hat one more time remains to be seen, but if he can’t, he’s still had an infinitely better run than most, and at the end of the day, that’s not a bad epitaph.
