COWBOYS & ALIENS Creator Has Big Plans For a New Movie

Back in 2011 director Jon Favreau’s sci-fi western Cowboys & Aliens was released in theaters. I remember seeing the film at Comic-Con that year and I thought it was a blast! I actually watched it again a few months ago and I still enjoyed it! Unfortunately, the movie didn’t do very well at the box office, and that’s why we never saw any sequels.

It’s pretty crazy that the film didn’t do better as it came from the director of Iron Man and it had an incredible ensemble cast that included Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, and Paul Dano. And it really was a fun flick!

Well, the rights to the property have reverted back to the original creator of the comic book, Scott Mitchell, and he’s got some big plans for a new film adaptation. He recently talked to Yahoo Entertainment and he shared his opinion on what he thinks killed the film’s success, saying:

“It’s interesting: when it debuted at San Diego Comic-Con, the reviews from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter were very positive. But the articles that came out after talked about the box office, and because it didn’t do better at the box office, the reviews were different, which I don’t think is very fair.”

He went on to explain that he thinks that Universal’s constant micromanaging played a big party in hurting the film’s potential:

“Universal announced the release date for the movie without going over it with DreamWorks. Had everything been cordial, it would have been bumped to the following summer [of 2012] because that way we could have gotten a lot of merchandising going. It was just 11 months without a Christmas in between to do anything. They just weren’t working together on things, and people were pointing hands in different directions. It had its effect.”

While that first movie didn’t do as well as he hoped, he is planning another attempt to make a movie:

“We’ve been talking to investors about a new movie. It can’t be based on any of the stuff that came before, so we have to go back to the source material or create new source material.”

I personally think that the story would work so much better being adapted as a series. They already did the film and while it bombed at the box office it was good! I’d like to see this story adapted as a series because there’s so much to play with, with the story and characters.