There has been a clear line of Western icons throughout cinema history, and Clint Eastwood teamed up with his successor for a non-Western crime drama that is among the best of its genre. For the first few decades of Hollywood Westerns, John Wayne was the best of the best. In the 1960s, Clint Eastwood took over that spot.
By the 1990s, Eastwood was moving out of the Western business, with Unforgiven his loving goodbye to the genre for a while. Replacing him was Kevin Costner, and he has since picked up the baton and run with it. However, in 1993, Eastwood and Costner teamed up for a crime drama that ended up a minor masterpiece.
Clint Eastwood & Kevin Costner Co-Starred In A Perfect World
In 1993, Clint Eastwood was coming off his greatest success, directing and starring in the brilliant Western Unforgiven. This was looked at as the final great Western movie, and Eastwood was moving into other areas in his directing career. Meanwhile, Kevin Costner was three years removed from his Western Dances With Wolves.
It seemed that Eastwood was on his way out and Costner was on his way in, and in 1993, it was time for the two actors to team up. The movie was called A Perfect World, and it was a crime drama. Costner stars as a convict named Butch who escapes from prison and takes a hostage, a young boy named Phillip.
Clint Eastwood stars as Red Garnett, the chief of the Texas Rangers, who sets out to bring Butch in. Red and BVutch had a history, as Butch was given a harsh sentence for car theft as a teen, and his lengthy prison sentence turned him into a worse criminal, and Red wanted to help Butch in the end.
Critics praised the movie, with praise going to Clint Eastwood for his direction and to Kevin Costner for his performance as the escaped criminal who became a protector to the young boy he had abducted. Despite this, it remains an almost forgotten crime drama that deserves a much bigger audience.
Since its release, when it was a box office disappointment, critics have begun to reappraise the film as one of Clint Eastwood’s most underrated and satisfying directorial efforts. Furthermore, the iconic critical publication Cahiers du Cinéma named it the best film of 1993, a year that included Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park.
Eastwood Only Appeared In The Movie Because Costner Rewrote The Script
While Clint Eastwood was signed on to direct A Perfect World, he had no intention of appearing in the movie at first. John Lee Hancock wrote the original script, his second movie, and a few years before he became a director himself, writing and directing films like The Rookie, The Alamo, and The Blind Side.
Three years after Kevin Costner directed his incredibly successful Western, Dances with Wolves, and Eastwood directed his brilliant revisionist Western, The Unforgiven, the two teamed up for their first and only time. Eastwood had agreed to direct this movie after Steven Spielberg passed on it to make Jurassic Park.
Eastwood agreed to cast Costner as Butch, but the actor wanted Eastwood to star in the movie with him, believing it could help his career as a Western star. However, Eastwood didn’t want to take on the role. This led Costner to take a chance, and he began working with Hancock on the script to beef up Red’s role.
Producer Mark Johnson said that the part of Red was “changed so that he had some vested interest in being there.” Costner also boosted Laura Dern’s Sally to have a line that helped make the decision easier when she said Red wanted to find redemption.
“I’d rather play that instead of playing a guy who comes in and says, ‘OK, I’ll just shoot him, partner!’ That’s pretty boring,” Eastwood said. “At this stage in my life, I’ve done all that. There are younger guys who can do that.” Thanks to Costner’s work on the script, Eastwood finally said he would appear as Red.
Sadly, the movie was disappointing at the time, with Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood both believing it was underwhelming. This was especially true after their previous Western success stories.
Kevin Costner Proved To Be Clint Eastwood’s Successor In The Western Genre
The disappointment of A Perfect World’s box office meant that Kevin Costner had a little longer road before he finally replaced Clint Eastwood as a modern-day Western star. The year after A Perfect World, Kevin Costner starred in Wyatt Earp, but it ended up as the lesser of two Earp movies, clearly falling behind Tombstone at the box office.
However, this was only the start. Costner, who had starred in some great sports dramas in the 1980s, began to experience a series of flops. He starred in Waterworld in 1995 and The Postman in 1997, both of which were massive commercial flops at the box office. It seemed Costner’s time was ending.
Luckily, things took a turn for the better in the 2000s. He directed and starred in Open Range in 2003, which received positive reviews and was a minor box office success. He then found massive success on television, first in Hatfield’s & McCoys in 2012 and then in Yellowstone in 2018.
Add in The Highwayman in 2019 and Horizon in 2024, and it was clear that Kevin Costner was the modern-day Clint Eastwood in the Western genre, although he never quite hit the same level as Eastwood or John Wayne before him.
