Sometimes Hollywood experiments hit gold, and other times, you get Cowboys & Aliens. Back in 2011, Iron Man director Jon Favreau tried to wrangle a sci-fi Western blend with one of the most stacked casts imaginable. The movie starred Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Paul Dano, Walton Goggins, and more. With names like that, how could it miss? Well, miss, it did as the movie was a box office failure and was brutally lassoed by critics and audiences alike. However, over a decade later, Cowboys & Aliens has maintained a certain intrigue and has now found a second life on streaming as that “so bad it’s kinda good” gem fans can’t resist revisiting.
Over on Peacock, subscribers are giving Cowboys & Aliens a surprising new lease on life. The film has climbed its way into the streamer’s Top 10, currently sitting at No. 9 among the most-watched titles. Not bad for a movie that has, for the most part, been dismissed as a forgotten relic. The premise is as wild as it sounds — Craig playing a mysterious amnesiac cowboy who helps the town of Absolution fend off alien invaders. And while critics weren’t convinced back in 2011, slapping it with a rotten 44% rating, the movie sure has its defenders, and that includes Collider’s Kelcie Mattson, who recently celebrated it in an appreciation piece, where she highlighted some of the aspects that could be responsible for its surprising resurgence. In her words, the movie is “a hot mess delivered in a riotously entertaining package.” And sometimes, messy fun is all you need.
What Did Taylor Sheridan Say About Sci-Fi Westerns?
Genre blending is tough to pull off, and sci-fi westerns are especially tricky. The tones often clash, no matter how much star power you throw at them. The subgenre has few true successes, a point modern Western hitmaker Taylor Sheridan has hammered home in the past. In a past interview, he bluntly expressed his feelings about the mash-up, calling it “dead” in defense of the more classic Western style:
“I knew there was such a thirst, that a Western done well is a universally loved genre. It captures everything American, this sense of freedom and vastness and independence. And there’s a romance to it…I remember there was an article written about the Western genre is dead, and it came out right after the movie Space Cowboys came out.
“And I remember saying, ‘No, the Western genre is not dead, but the sh*tty Western genre where you try to merge it with f**king aliens is dead. That’s dead, and there’s no reason to ever revive that.’ I just don’t think I’m that unique. If something’s interesting to me, it’s probably going to be interesting to a lot of other people. I’m just not that f**king special.”
And yet, while the sci-fi Western may be “dead” on paper, the recent streaming resurgence of Cowboys & Aliens suggests audiences still have an appetite for weird, messy, genre-bending rides, especially when they’re entertaining. Cowboys & Aliens is streaming now on Peacock. Check it out!
