“Ishtar” is now entirely free of summer-blockbuster expectations, and what might have looked 25 years ago like “oversized spectacle” has an appealing modesty. The fast-moving, surreal, behind-the-beat verbal wit that is Ms. May’s specialty may be easier to appreciate at a time when her influence, acknowledged and implicit, permeates so much television and Web-based comedy. And the director herself, caricatured as fussy and obsessive — and also, somehow, as undisciplined and indecisive — in the mid-’80s press, looks in hindsight like a heroic underdog, a visionary whose only crime was a stubborn belief in the integrity of her vision.

The ambition that was punished has now been pardoned. This is the retroactive moral of quite a few stories from the 1970s and ’80s. In most cases — “Heaven’s Gate,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Cotton Club,” “New York, New York” — the first draft of history was a tale of unchecked directorial self-indulgence. The studio system that had constrained the egos and budgets of filmmakers was gone, and a New Hollywood more receptive to auteurism had arisen in its place. In retrospect, the high-profile failures of the pre-“Ishtar” decade exposed the weakness of director-driven cinema as a business model and also provided a pretext for its dismantling. There is a degree of nostalgia, as well as a sense of delayed justice, in the retroactive embrace of the old films maudits, whose artistic virtues were obscured by their commercial failings.

But the turkeys of 2013 have taken wing under a different business model, one that favors carefully engineered sameness over wild originality. What is striking is how many of the failures are action movies — less-than-great comedies like “The Heat” and “Grown-Ups 2” have done very well, as have animated sequels — and how interchangeable their elements seem. You want a fight on a train, a guy in a big metal suit, a pair of mismatched buddies, a major city blown to smithereens? You could have had that almost every weekend this summer, but you would also have had to endure all of that, again and again, to find flashes of freshness or surprise. It can hardly be said that summer movies suffer from a surfeit of individuality, or that critics and audiences rejected them this year for being too original.

Maybe in the future it will seem that way. “The Lone Ranger” may yet ride again, and sooner than you think. Whispers of revisionism have started to come from France, where some critics are much more favorably disposed toward it than their American counterparts. (Chinese audiences have embraced “Pacific Rim,” which has made more money after three weeks in theaters there than in six weeks here.) The French have a long history of appreciating our popular art sooner and more fully than we do, something that has been the case with movies in general and westerns in particular.

“The Lone Ranger” has so far upheld this rule, finding its most passionate defense in the pages of Les Inrockuptibles, a savvy and irreverent publication that might be described as a hybrid of Entertainment Weekly, Gawker and The New York Review of Books. The Inrocks’ critic, Jacky Goldberg, found not only “constant surprise” and “incalculable joy,” but also an unexpected political resonance, “an astonishingly progressive discourse, especially on the part of the right-wing producer Jerry Bruckheimer.” Noting the film’s depiction of an America founded on slaughter and exploitation “in the name of rapacious capitalism and nutty religion,” Mr. Goldberg wondered if Mr. Bruckheimer had been reading the works of Howard Zinn and Karl Marx.

That is an intriguing possibility, one that may distract right-wing culture warriors from their preoccupation with the alleged socialism of “Elysium.” And perhaps somebody will claim that the failure of “The Lone Ranger” is an example of the American people rejecting Hollywood leftism. But there is another way to think about Mr. Goldberg’s interpretation, which sees the Lone Ranger and Tonto as figures of resistance fighting back against the forces of corporate domination. The audience may already be on their side, and may have avoided the movie for just that reason. Perhaps this will change. History is full of surprises, and predicting the future can be dangerous business.