Jerry Bruckheimer has spoken to The Hollywood Reporter about the issues he and Johnny Depp had with Disney about the budget for The Lone Ranger, which was scaled back from $270ish million to $215.
"We had a script that we kept working on. It was evolving. You start looking at locations, you look at the menu and say: "I like all these desserts. I want 'em all." And you hit a number and they say, "We can't afford that." Then you start cutting it back. Disney wanted to stop the spending unless they felt the budget corresponded to the number that the boss [Iger] wanted. They had set a deadline [Aug. 12] for us to submit a budget, and we didn't hit their number. They said, "Can you hit it?" We didn't have enough time to really vet the budget, and we said we couldn't hit it right away. And they said, "We have to stop the bleeding." We understood what they were doing, but we wanted to keep working."
Seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation for a highly publicised situation. Armie Hammer plays the titular character, Johnny Depp is Tonto, while Gore Verbinski.