Disney Surprises Comic Con Crowd With Teaser Trailer Of 'The Lone Ranger'

The Lone Ranger has not had the best press in the last year. It was about 11 months ago when Disney announced that they were completely shutting down pre-production on the Jerry Bruckheimer production. Fast forward a few months and suddenly Disney, Bruckheimer, director Gore Verbinsky and the entire cast were ready to make this thing happen. Of course 50 MILLION dollars was shaved of the enormous 250 million dollar budget, but it seemed that all was well.

In the past few weeks there have been numerous reports of new budget problems, local casting shortages and then there's the lingering uproar about the casting of Johnny Depp as Tonto.

So, it seems that Disney wanted San Diego Comic Con to be their place to make a stand against this storm of controversy. At the very end of the Walt Disney Studio's presentation inside Hall H, Fans were surprised with a two minute teaser trailer of the film that is still in production in Yuma, Arizona. What was in that short trailer? Here is a full description of the trailer from CinemaBlend.com:

The Lone Ranger is much more about trains than you're probably imagining. Disney snuck a brief trailer for their upcoming, huge-budget action film at the very end of today's Hall H panel, and for about a solid minute the entire focus was on railroads-- the laborers who built them, the businessmen who profited off them, and a man in voiceover explaining that "Whoever controls this, controls the future." Finally Tonto (Johnny Depp) and the Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer) appear, but while it's not entirely clear what they're doing with the railroads, we do get to see Depp clinging to the underside of a moving train-- so there's something you don't see every day.

The glimpses at both characters were incredibly brief-- the big money shot of the two of them together was essentially just a moving version of this promo image, and at the tail end of the trailer we see the two of them trying to take over a train, but entirely in quick cuts. Depp's look as Tonto is just as strange as you think, and in one line of voiceover dialogue-- "There comes a time, kemosabe, when good man must wear mask"-- he's speaking in a kind of broken English that I'm sure has already made Native American groups furious (I'm willing to withhold judgment to see how it works out, though it still seems dicey). But Hammer looks every bit the classic, square-jawed hero as the ranger, riding horses and hold a gun and wearing a mask that, somehow, doesn't look ridiculous. In the span of a two-minute trailer, at least.