In 2007, a Western movie that had previously been “passed on by every studio” finally made its way into theaters against all odds. A true masterpiece, the film went on to garner a 4-star rating from the most famous movie critic ever, Roger Ebert, and it has been ranked the ‘Greatest Western Movie’ of the 2000s.
‘Passed On by Every Studio’: The Industry’s Fear of the Western
In 2005, James Mangold seemed to be on top of the cinematic world following the critical and commercial success of a movie he co-wrote and directed, Walk the Line. That is why it is stunning that in June 2006, Variety reported that his next project, 3:10 to Yuma, had been put into turnaround when it was ready to start filming. That meant that after previously greenlighting the project and years of development, Sony Pictures pulled the plug. That left the director scrambling to find a new company to bankroll the ambitious project.
As an IGN article noted, Relativity Media eventually financed the movie, and Lionsgate came on board to distribute. While that sentence might make it seem like there was a seamless transition to another studio, that definitely wasn’t the case. When 3:10 to Yuma was being released, Mangold spoke to Ain’t It Cool News about the rejection the film faced. “We got passed on by every studio… Nobody wants to make it. It wasn’t like ‘I’ll make it for this price…’ no one really wanted to make it at all at any price.”
Mangold also described why the Hollywood studios thought the movie too risky. “The way that [producer] Cathy Konrad always puts it to me is… the way that business is run these days, they run these computer models on movies to see whether they can turn a profit. When they hit the genre ‘Western’ into their computer model, the problem is it just doesn’t spit out profit. There are too many [failures], from All the Pretty Horses to The Missing… they just don’t gross in their mind… and that produces a bias against the genre in general, which, to Cathy and I, seems, on its face, to be kind of idiotic.”