Image caption Publicity for Disney's Lone Ranger has failed to bring in returns to match 
 
 Walt Disney has warned that its Lone Ranger summer film will lose it between $160m-$190m (£104m-£124m) after heavy spending on promotion failed to bring returns. 
 
 The news came with the entertainment giant's third quarter results. 
 
 They showed earnings almost unchanged but revenue up 4%, thanks to its theme parks and cable networks, such as ESPN. 
 
 Disney said it earned $1.85bn in the quarter to the end of June, up from $1.83bn last year. 
 
 Revenue at its theme parks and resorts grew by 7% to $3.7bn while cable network revenue was up by 8%. 
 
 The parks in California and Florida attracted more visitors, and operating income for that division outstripped that of the resorts, rising by 9% to $689m. 
 
 ESPN is facing new competition from 21st Century Fox's Fox Sports 1, which is launching this month. 
 
 Disney's chairman and chief executive, Bob Iger, said the new competitor had not harmed advertising sales at ESPN. 
 
 Fox news and entertainment was recently spun off from News Corporation, which retains its businesses of newspapers and publishing. 
 
 Media caption Media analyst Danny Schechter: 'The Mouse House has financial problems' 
 
 Risks 
 
 The losses from the Lone Ranger film, which stars Johnny Depp, will show up in the next quarterly figures. 
 
 The film had its premiere in early July and made $29m in US and Canadian ticket sales over its first weekend, a figure considered weak in the industry for a major release. 
 
 It opens in the UK this weekend. 
 
 Disney said Iron Man 3, which was released in late spring, had fared worse than The Avengers which was out a year earlier, but that its Pixar movie Monsters University was doing better than its children's film Brave did a year ago. 
 
 Mr Iger said he was happy with the results, adding: "We are confident that our strategy of creating high-quality branded content positions us well for the future." 
 
 He said he appreciated the risks associated with high-cost films, but that he still thought they were worth the risk. 
 
 "One way to rise above the din and the competition is with a big film, not just big budget, but big story, big cast, big marketing behind it," he said. ||||| The signage at the main gate of The Walt Disney Co. is pictured in Burbank, California, May 7, 2012. 
 
 LOS ANGELES | 
 
 LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Walt Disney Co expects to lose between $160 million and $190 million on its expensive summer movie bomb "The Lone Ranger," the media giant said on Tuesday as it reported a small gain in quarterly profit that beat Wall Street forecasts. 
 
 The loss for "The Lone Ranger," a Western starring Johnny Depp, will be recorded for the quarter that ends in September, Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo said on a conference call with analysts. 
 
 Disney shares dropped 1.9 percent in after-hours trading to $65.79 from a $67.05 close on the New York Stock Exchange. 
 
 "Lone Ranger" opened July 3 with a dismal $29 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales over its first weekend. 
 
 "There has been a lot said, I know, about the risk of basically high cost, tent pole films," Disney CEO Bob Iger said, "and we certainly can attest to that given what happened with Lone Ranger." 
 
 "We still think the tentpole strategy is a good strategy," he said. "That one way to rise above the din and the competition is with a big film, not just big budget, but big story, big cast, big marketing behind it." 
 
 For the quarter that ended in June, operating income at Disney's film studio declined 36 percent as hit film "Iron Man 3" failed to match the spectacular success of last year's "The Avengers." 
 
 Overall, net income for the quarter rose 1 percent to $1.85 billion. Adjusted earnings-per-share reached $1.03, beating the $1.01 average forecast from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. 
 
 Operating income increased at the company's theme parks and its media networks division, which operates sports channel ESPN. 
 
 "Overall it was a decent quarter, but nothing to get excited about," Wunderlich Securities analyst Matt Harrigan said. 
 
 A gain in fees and advertising revenue at ESPN helped lift operating income at Disney's media networks by 8 percent to $2.3 billion for the quarter. 
 
 At the parks unit, operating income increased 9 percent to $689 million as more people visited Disney's theme parks in Florida and California. 
 
 The interactive gaming unit posted a loss of $58 million. The company is counting on the August 18 release of its Infinity game to turn the unit profitable. 
 
 (Reporting by Lisa Richwine and Ronald Grover; Editing by Richard Chang, Bernard Orr) ||||| The Lone Ranger has dodged bullets and foiled bandits, evaded arrows and leapt from the path of runaway trains. But now, it appears, he has been gunned down with extreme prejudice by a cowardly posse of pencil-necked film critics – at least according to the Hollywood actor Johnny Depp. 
 
 Smarting from the box office failure of The Lone Ranger, Depp suggests that the movie's performance was hobbled by unfair expectations and bad reviews, many of which were drafted before its US opening last month. "I think the reviews were written seven to eight months before we released the film," Depp claimed. "[The critics] had expectations that it must be a blockbuster. I don't have any expectations of that. I never do." 
 
 The Lone Ranger stars Armie Hammer as the resolute Texas lawman and Depp as Tonto, his Comanche spirit guide. Budgeted at $225m, the film suffered a tortuous production process and met with largely scathing reviews on its release in the US. Industry experts predict that the Disney picture may end up losing $150m. 
 
 Producers Jerry Bruckheimer and others in the film supported Depp's complaints: "I think they were reviewing the budget, not reviewing the movie," Bruckheimer told Yahoo UK and Ireland. "It's unfortunate, because the movie is a terrific movie, it's a great epic film, it has a lot of humour. It's one of those movies that whatever the critics missed in it this time, they'll review it in a few years and see that they made a mistake." 
 
 Hammer, Depp's co-star in the film, claimed critics were "gunning" for The Lone Ranger long before it was released. "They decided to slit the jugular of our movie," he said. 
 
 Depp, Hammer and Bruckheimer's interpretation is unlikely to find much support within the critical community. Peter Travers, film critic at Rolling Stone, offered a simpler explanation: "Why is The Lone Ranger such a huge flop at the box office?" he asked. "Because the movie sucks, that's why." 
 
 The Lone Ranger opens in the UK on Friday.
– Who was that masked man, anyway? Perhaps it would have been better if Disney never found out. The company yesterday announced it has projected it will lose $160 million to $190 million on flop The Lone Ranger, which earned just $29 million in the US and Canada in its opening weekend (you may or may not recall it was absolutely slaughtered by Despicable Me 2), the BBC reports. Disney's CEO acknowledged that "high-cost, tent-pole films" were a risk, but that the company still believes "the tent-pole strategy is a good strategy," Reuters reports. But others involved in the film have been less conciliatory in their response to the news, blaming critics for the box office failure, the Guardian reports. "I think the reviews were written seven to eight months before we released the film," says star Johnny Depp. "[The critics] had expectations that it must be a blockbuster. I don't have any expectations of that. I never do." "I think they were reviewing the budget, not reviewing the movie," says producer Jerry Bruckheimer. (That budget was $225 million, by the way.) Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers offered an alternative explanation. "Why is The Lone Ranger such a huge flop at the box office?" he says. "Because the movie sucks, that's why."