WTF Happened to Cowboys & Aliens?

WTF Happened To This Movie? – The JoBlo series that looks at troubled productions, curious creative decisions, box-office failures, surprising successes, and cult favorites!

With Hollywood heavyweights like Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, Jon Favreau and Steven Spielberg collaborating on a killer genre mashup concept, Cowboys & Aliens seemed like a surefire smash blockbuster. But the 2011 release struggled with tonal inconsistency, an expensive and lengthy development, creative conflicts, mishandled marketing, and audiences’ expectations from a deceptive title. So strap on your six guns and find out, “WTF Happened to Cowboys & Aliens!”

Perhaps it started with the title. Cowboys and aliens? The two don’t really go together, now do they? The film was based on the Platinum Studios graphic novel and was planned as Jon Favreau‘s big-budget follow-up to his back-to-back Iron Man megahits. The film was initially set to star Robert Downey Jr, but as his star rose and he became busier and busier with the MCU, he had to drop out of the film.

Enter Daniel Craig, who, similar to Downey, had suddenly rocketed to the top of the A-list after taking on the role of James Bond in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. However, when he took on Cowboys & Aliens, his box office mettle outside of the 007 franchise hadn’t been proven, making him a risky gamble in the lead. So to back him up, they brought in one of the most iconic actors of all time, Harrison Ford, in the kind of two-fisted, heroic part audiences love him in.

So what happened? Despite decent reviews, the curse of Westerns at the box office won out. Audiences also seemed cool on period/sci-fi mashups around this time (note the failure of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies plus Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) – but there was more to it than that, as we reveal in this episode of WTF Happened to this Movie?

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