Very rarely can you say with any degree of certainty that a blockbuster is surely too big to fail, but from the outside looking in, Cowboys & Aliens ticked virtually every single one of the boxes required to find colossal success.
In his first feature since launching the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man and its sequel, Jon Favreau was handed a budget north of $160 million, a proven creative team, an insanely stacked cast, and the highest of high concepts to deliver a genre-bending fantasy that possessed all of the tools to thrive in a crowded box office marketplace.
Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard were among the producers, the writers behind smash hits including The Mask of Zorro, Transformers, Star Trek, Lost, Children of Men, and the aforementioned Iron Man were involved, while the cast was headlined by James Bond and Indiana Jones to further hammer home the movie’s credentials, and we didn’t even mention that it was a comic book adaptation.
Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford were joined by Paul Dano, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Walton Goggins, Clancy Brown, Wyatt Russell, and many more past, present, and future household names, while the self-explanatory premise made it the easiest thing in the world to market. And yet, Cowboys & Aliens somehow conspired to crater thunderously.
It was a head-scratcher for sure, but perhaps not entirely unexpected given that reviews were lukewarm across the board, with a nailed-on commercial crowd-pleaser instead suffering the ignominy of sinking without a trace. Admittedly, it was a long way away from being the sum of its parts, but FlixPatrol outing Cowboys & Aliens as a top-viewed title on Chili does at least hint that it’s got enough in the tank to mount a final stand on streaming.
