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Any guesses on why they don't seem to really make western movies anymore? It seems that there really haven't been many original westerns since Unforgiven. I think it would be interesting to see some new westerns come out. I would be interested to see who might star in westerns now, especially with the current younger crop of actors.
There are still a few Westerns being made, like 3:10 to Yuma and True Grit, but these are remakes of older ones. I guess there aren't too many Western stories left anymore that haven't been filmed.
Actors- no idea, but how about Leonardo Di Caprio, Will Smith, or Tom Hanks?
Will Smith was in "Wild Wild West". "Cowboys and Aliens" wasn't bad... "Tombstone" was very good several years back. I'm afraid the further we get into the hi-tech gadgetry, the further we get from westerns.
Tarantino is making Django Unchained, although technically it's more of a "southern" than a Western.
Disney is remaking The Lone Ranger, although I suspect it will feel more like Pirates of the Caribbean on horses than it will a western.
Westerns are still made whenever a filmmaker wants to make one, but studios are no longer manufacturing them like they did in the '50s and '60s.
Someone needs to tell Denzel about Bass Reeves. I'm aghast that no one has made a movie about that man. One of the great unsung heroes of the Old West.
I have a hard time considering the recent True Grit a remake. Remake implies that the new version is taking an old movie and redoing it. That isn't the case with TG. The John Wayne movie was a rather loose adaptation of an original novel. The Coen Bros' movie ignored the previous movie altogether and went back to the source material, to which it was much more faithful. So it wasn't truly a "remake" per se as a new movie based on the novel.
Appaloosa, There Will Be Blood, The Assassination of Jesse James, Cold Harbor, and others have all been released and did well at the box office in the last 5 years or less. Dirt, a feature cartoon with a Western theme, was real popular as well.
The Western genre is somewhat more inclusive than it once was. The eras of 1990 and 1900 are now so far in the past that they 'qualify' for being westerns, and the Civil War and it's aftermath have always been part of Western themes and plots.
Westerns never really died off; they just became less common as a genre than they once were because they were so common and so popular for so long. The thing is: Westerns don't need CG effects to make them work. We still have lots of spectacular natural settings, and Westerns don't need huge casts to be good movies. As some of the recent CG blockbusters didn't do so well at the box office, I expect to see more Westerns coming along in the next few years.
Regarding True Grit: I read the book several times- it's one of my favorites. The dialog is so rich and cinematically perfect that both versions lifted enormous hunks of it out of the book verbatim.
The John Wayne version was written for him as he bought the motion picture rights to the book early on, then kept it for a time when he was old enough to play Rooster Cogburn. His movie had Rooster as the central character much more than Mattie Ross, the 13-year old girl who was the center character of both the book and the Coen brother's version. Wayne did a wonderful Rooster, but the first Mattie didn't come across as being just as flinty and tough as Rooster.
The Coens put Mattie front and center in the second version, and ended the movie like the book. Jeff Bridges was Rooster straight out of the book- drunker, more slovenly, and a bigger blowhard than Wayne's portrayal, but equally as lethal.
I loved them both, but the second was much truer to the nature of the book. Both versions left out parts of the book and both added scenes that were not in it. The Wayne movie was more boisterous, with more of a humorous slant, while the second was more of a grim adventure with some humor.
Read the book. It's better than either movie. And it could stand a 3rd remake eventually. I was sorry that the Coens left out one of the funniest lines in the book: "They'll never outrun Little Blackie! Their horses are loaded down with fat men and iron!" The Wayne version included that one.
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