Every bit of movie news has to be taken with a fistful of salt. With so many moving parts, even the biggest players in the game sometimes see their work fall into the tall grass of development hell. That’s the bad news. The good news is that all of those times you shake your fist at a new project (be it remake or reboot) are warranted, but they don’t always get made. Sometimes, the stuff we’re dreading goes down in flames too. So it’s with that bittersweet spirit that we look back on a few announced projects that still haven’t been made. And might never be.

It may be considered old news since it happened a whole week ago, but Disney passing on The Lone Ranger is a remarkably good sign. It’s noteworthy for more than the average news of the day because it hints at a crack in the current foundation of studio thinking. It’s barely ever publicized, since a studio refusing to make a film is hardly newsworthy, but a project this high-profile, featuring talent like Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski, that’s been reported on so thoroughly used to be a done deal. Now, that’s not the case. It’s not like this is the end of the story crisis or anything, but it’s the Hollywood equivalent of a crack addict putting down the pipe, and it should be celebrated.

Despite the fact that the storytelling went off the rails and the budget’s bloated to bursting, Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy ended up making Disney more money than most spoiled aristocrats will see in their lifetime. Given his rep as a franchise builder, I thought it was pretty shocking when Disney recently pulled the plug on his upcoming movie The Lone Ranger. Yeah, a $250m budget is ridiculously high for a movie about a couple of guys on horses, but with Verbinski teaming back up with his Pirates star Johnny Depp, and The Lone Ranger already being a property that people are familiar with, I figured this project would be bullet proof. Not so, as according to THR, a Lone Ranger with a $250m budget would have to hit upwards of $800 million to make a profit after all of the necessary marketing costs and shady backroom money trading were handled. Despite the fact that a movie needing to make more than three times its budget to turn a profit is ridiculous, and the surest sign that the studio system is broken, that’s just the way it is. And with John Favreau’s Cowboys and Aliens not coming close to that number this summer, pumping so much money into a Western isn’t a risk Disney is looking to take, even in their Pirates of the Caribbean and Alice in Wonderland magic man Johnny Depp is on board.

Universal and Gore Verbinski seem to be having a competition to see who can be crazier. Universal fired a big first shot back in 2008 when they signed a seven picture deal with Hasbro to make a whole series of board game movies. They seem to have wised up a bit as to what a ridiculous idea that is, as they’ve already ditched Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering movies, and they’ve now decided to cut ties with an adaptation of the murder mystery game Clue; but a strong case can still be made for their insanity. Mostly because Battleship will be coming out soon and will be the first of their seven picture deal that actually gets released. What would you rather see a movie about, a murder mystery or people blindly guessing as to which points on a grid are “hits”? Yeah, Universal seems to have completely lost their minds.

Cary Fukunaga will no doubt have a long and steady career because the young director came right out of the gate with the beautifully brilliant Sin Nombre and followed it up with a more than capable period piece in Jane Eyre. He’s an auteur who 1) is still building his style and 2) refuses to work within one genre. Even if he’s still developing his signature, hopefully Fukunaga will bring his sense of atmosphere and environment to his forthcoming sci-fi drama. Spaceless, according to The Hollywood Reporter, tells the story of “an assassin who wakes up inside a spacesuit tumbling helplessly through space, with a computer designed to keep him company until his air runs out. He must try to solve the mystery of his death, which began when he broke into an orbiting space station to carry out a hit. The man, however, begins to question his reality, unsure if he is succumbing to madness or in an artificially created environment.” It’s a fun idea (that certainly borrows from other ideas), and it’s great to see Fukunaga continue to elude definition. The director will also rework the spec script written by Jeff Vintar (no stranger to sci-fi himself), Gore Verbinski will produce, and it seems like the only actor not up for the role would be Sam Rockwell because, well, you know. There’s no way they could hire Sam Rockwell for this. They’re going to, aren’t they?

A genre nearly as old as filmmaking itself, the western thrived throughout the years of the studio system but has zigzagged across rough terrain for the past forty or so years. For the last fifteen-ish years, the struggling, commercially unfriendly genre was either manifested in a neoclassical nostalgic form limited in potential mass appeal (Appaloosa, Open Range) or in reimagined approaches that ran the gamut between contrived pap and inspired deconstructions (anything from Wild Wild West to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). But last December, True Grit – a bona fide western remake that relied on the opportunities available in the genre’s conventions rather than bells, whistles, or ironic tongues in their respective cheeks – became a smash hit. Did this film reinvigorate a genre that was on life support, as the supposed revitalization of the musical is thought to have done a decade ago, or are westerns surviving by moving along a different route altogether? Three westerns released so far this year – Gore Verbinski’s Rango, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, and, as of this weekend, Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens – suggest mixed directions for the dusty ol’ genre.

Ahoy! Yeah, I know that’s a lame way to start. Especially when you consider this week’s Commentary Commentary, our third, goes from essential classics like The Thing and Die Hard to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. We’re not scraping the bottom of the barrel just yet, and even though Curse of the Black Pearl is by no means a bad movie, it just hasn’t reached a level of beloved nostalgia like our first two. Okay. Enough preamble. This DVD offers three separate commentaries featuring various members of the cast and crew, but rather than hear the insight Jack Davenport had to offer – we love you, Jack – it’s probably best to hear from the film’s director and star. So here, without any further waggery or warm-up, is what was learned from their commentary.

For a while, the only thing we really knew about Disney’s upcoming The Lone Ranger is that Johnny Depp would be starring, curiously enough, as Tonto. Then, as the project began to take shape, we learned that he would be re-teaming with his Pirates of the Caribbean and Rango director Gore Verbinski, who came on to helm things. Then the third big piece of the puzzle came into place when The Social Network’s Übermensch Armie Hammer signed on to play The Lone Ranger himself. And now that the big names are in place, it has come time to begin filling out the rest of the cast.

I’ve learned two new things about Johnny Depp after reading some comments that he gave Inside Movies. One is that he is very passionate about 50s era TV serials, and the other is that he is probably the most Native American man on the planet. What we knew already is that Depp is set to play Tonto in a big screen adaptation of The Lone Ranger with the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy’s Gore Verbinski set to handle the directing. What’s new news is that Depp thinks the character of The Lone Ranger is kind of a dick, and he doesn’t plan on letting him push his version of Tonto around. Depp says, “I remember watching it as a kid, with Jay Silverheels and Clayton Moore, and going, ‘Why is the f—ing Lone Ranger telling Tonto what to do?’” Dang Johnny, you kiss your mistress with that mouth? I guess now that I’m thinking about it, Tonto was kind of The Lone Ranger’s bitch, but is it really so serious that you have to curse about it?

It looks like everyone is throwing their hats into the ring. When the studios announced a plan to release movies in home theaters just 30 days after the theaters located outside the home (with a price tag of $30 per rental), the National Association of Theater Owners balked. Apparently their threat to boycott big blockbusters was a fake, but they haven’t kept secret their disgust for the new model that would limit their ability to make money showing movies (since studios take the 50%-100% lion’s share of the ticket split in the first weeks). Now, 23 directors and producers are speaking out against it. That list includes James Cameron, Michael Bay, Kathryn Bigelow, Guillermo del Toro, Roland Emmerich, Antoine Fuqua, Todd Garner, Lawrence Gordon, Stephen Gyllenhaal, Gale Anne Hurd, Peter Jackson, Karyn Kusama, Jon Landau, Shawn Levy, Michael Mann, Bill Mechanic, Jamie Patricof, Todd Phillips, Brett Ratner, Robert Rodriguez, Adam Shankman, Gore Verbinski, and Robert Zemeckis. The full, un-edited open letter is below:

Gore Verbinski’s Rango is not a spoof or satire of westerns. It is, in fact, a genuine western. Keeping that in mind, Verbinski hasn’t made an animated film with modern “of-the-moment” pop-culture references and a wacky hip soundtrack. Rango is no Shrek or Madagascar. The archetypes, the story, the score (courtesy of Hans Zimmer) and style is done in an old-school fashion, but with a slight twist. This isn’t Verbinski’s first western outing. The Pirates of the Caribbean films are total odes to the western and even some of Verbinski’s smaller-scale films – such as The Weather Man and The Mexican – feature the stampings of the genre. As for the realism, Verbinski wanted to keep his animated feature as grounded in live-action filmmaking as much as possible. Here’s what the soft-spoken eclectic director had to say about not making a western spoof, avoiding perfection in animation, and the meta aspect of Rango:

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr gets an added dose of tiger’s blood and Adonis DNA to make it through all the movie-watching he endures. He bats about .500 in his screenings, really liking some but struggling through others. After a visit to the wild west of Rango, he finds his fate adjusted by a mysterious fleet of men with stylish hats. Then, he realizes how ugly Number Four really is before staying out all night, drinking with Topher Grace and Teresa Palmer… who looks a lot like Number Six.

Rango is the first animated genre movie I’ve seen that, with no exaggeration, works as well as its live-action counterparts possibly could. Gore Verbinski’s latest is a damn fine western, an entertaining throwback to classic B-pictures that pays clever tribute to its predecessors. Sure, it’s populated by walking/talking lizards, rattlesnakes, and Gila monsters. So what? A lizard suffering from some serious existential torment, Rango (Johnny Depp) knows not who he is or of the world beyond the tank he’s called home and the pseudo-tropical knickknacks he’s made his friends. That changes forever when a karmic car accident finds the good-humored, tropical shirt-baring reptile abandoned in the Mojave Desert, his domicile destroyed forever. Making his way through the treacherous terrain, our hero dodges an enormous falcon, befriends roadkill named Roadkill (Alfred Molina) and is eventually escorted by fiery fellow lizard Beans (Isla Fisher) to the long-forgotten, crumbling town of Dirt.

While sitting down and chatting with Coming Soon, director Gore Verbinski explained why he would not be involved in the creation of a Bioshock movie after all.  It turns out he couldn’t find anybody to fund an R rated action film. To explain, Bioshock is a first person shooter video game where the playable character is a plane crash survivor who ends up stranded in a crazy underwater world. This undiscovered society has seen better days, is a little bit post-apocalyptic, and you end up needing to shoot pretty much everything that lives there to get your way through the story. Verbinski said of his position, “ … I wasn’t really interested in pursuing a PG-13 version. Because the R rating is inherent.” So studio accountants wanted to make a movie about a game where 90% of everything that happens is shooting things PG-13. What kind of a world are we living in?

At one point, George Clooney was among those rumored to play the titular role in Disney’s big screen adaptation of The Lone Ranger. Since then, we haven’t heard much about the project. In fact, producer Jerry Bruckheimer went as far as saying that they weren’t going to worry about it until they got a director. That was in 2008. They can now begin the search for a Ranger, as Gore Verbinski has been confirmed as director. Johnny Depp will still play Tonto, the film will likely hit theaters in 2012. The rest is to be determined. One thing we do know: Verbinski is definitely trying to give Tim Burton a run for his money in the “who can work with Johnny Depp the most this decade” competition. [The Wrap]

When the calendar page turns to October, we Rejects have only one thought: horror. To celebrate this grandest and darkest of months, we’ll cover one excellent horror film a day for the entirety of the month. That’s 31 Days of Horror and 31 Films perfect for viewing on a dark, chilly, October night. If you, like us, love horror and Halloween, give us a Hell Yeah and keep coming every day this month for a new dose of adrenaline. Synopsis: Beware unmarked video tapes. Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) discovers this when her niece, Katie (Amber Tamblyn) is found dead in her bedroom, her face horribly distorted like something out of an Edvard Munch painting. Keller’s a journalist and her reporter’s curiosity sends her on a journey to find the cause of her niece’s death. She discovers a legend about a video tape. When viewed it leads to the death of the viewer in seven days. Her investigation becomes an increasingly bizarre search for the truth about a girl named Samara. Her journey becomes more urgent after she watches the video, and even worse when her son does.

It was eleven months ago that Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, the 28 Weeks Later director, took over helming duties for a Bioshock film with Gore Verbinski still bringing his larger than life producing to the project. That means that in one month, we’ll have gone a full year without any serious movement on bringing the video game adaptation to life on the big screen. That also means that it’s about that time for someone with big guns to be talking about it again – and Verbinski is still talking a vaguely strong game about delivering for the fans.

Paramount Pictures has released the first teaser for Gore Verbinski’s upcoming animated flick Rango, starring Johnny Depp as a Hawaiian shirt wearing lizard who wanders through the Mojave desert in search of himself. Much of his world feels like a good peyote trip and everything around him is a talking animal of some kind. And we’re being told that it has nothing to do with Hunter S. Thompson. I’m not convinced.

The world finally has its first look at Rango, the character at the heart of Gore Verbinski’s upcoming animated movie that will star the voice of Johnny Depp. It’s also the character at the heart of that very strange teaser trailer, or non-trailer as the studio explained later. It’s all very confusing, but it will soon come into focus.

Considering that we post movie news, almost every trailer we can find, and speculate wildly on film casting, we’re all about mystery here at FSR. It’s because we, and the rest of the world, are so awash in information that we long for a movie that comes out of left field and hits us in the face. With a fish. This new teaser trailer for Rango does exactly what it needs to do. It teases.