If there was one movie that was pretty good but was still a massive let-down, it was Cowboys & Aliens, waaaaaaaaay back in 2011.
I remember seeing the trailer for the first time and being really excited for it and when the negative reviews hit, despite a cast full of actors I love – Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Paul Dano, I mean, come on! – and being directed by Jon Favreau, for some reason it just got past me.
A while after, I caught it one night on TV and, while I liked it, I knew it could have been much, much better
In the end, it lost the studio money and all hopes of sequels, spin-offs or anything else were long gone.
However, it seems that Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, creator of the comics, left, has revealed that he felt like the rest of us… but there’s good news on the horizon. Hopefully.
“It’s interesting: when it debuted at San Diego Comic-Con, the reviews from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter were very positive,” Mitchell says.
“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.”
Rosenberg believes that Universal scuppered the movie’s chance of making an impact, saying: “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.”
However, all is not lost, for the rights are no longer with Universal and have reverted back to Rosenberg: “We’ve been talking to investors about a new movie,” he says.
However, don’t expect Craig or any of the others to be making a comeback as he adds: “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.”
You know what, I could get excited for this if it was done with real heart and this is the golden age for this sort of thing, so let’s hope that it gets the second chance it deserves.
Thoughts, on this one, guys and gals, I want hear them all.
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