For months, even before the much-publicized budgetary issues between the studio and the filmmakers, Dwight Yoakam was more or less attached to play Butch Cavendish in the theatrical revival of the long-lived masked western avenger.  On Friday of last week, though, Yoakam departed the film due to scheduling conflicts.

With the role vacated and principal photography underway, Verbinski moved fast to find a replacement, and according to Deadline, it's Fichtner.  The actor just finished up work on Elysium, the next movie from Neill Blomkamp which stars Matt Damon.  Fichtner was last seen as The Accountant in Drive Angry and as Phil Yagoda on HBO's Entourage. 

he's got a crazy-long list of credits going back to the late 1980's, but there are certainly some films with which Fichtner is more associated, including turns in Heat, Black Hawk Down, Armageddon, The Perfect Storm, and Doug Liman's Go, in which he played a rather strange Amway-selling cop.  He appeared briefly but memorably in the Joker's introductory sequence in The Dark Knight, and starred in about 60 episodes of the Fox series Prison Break.

He joins an ensemble cast led, of course, by Hammer and Depp as the film's heroes, whose dynamic will apparently be quite different from their traditional hero/sidekick roles.  Also in the cast are Helena Bonham Carter, Barry Pepper, Tom Wilkinson, Ruth Wilson, and James Badge Dale.  Under Verbinski's direction, they'll all be spouting dialogue written by Justin Haythe, working from previous drafts by Pirates of the Caribbean writing duo Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio.

The Lone Ranger is scheduled for May 31, 2013.

And here's a tiny clip from 2000's otherwise not-great Drowning Mona showing Fichtner's perfect comedic timing: