New and Upcoming Western Movies and TV Shows

There's a lot of optimism (wishful thinking?) in Just Westerns':

"...preview of 40 new upcoming Western films and TV shows heading are way in 2026 and beyond, including Young Guns 3, Lonesome Dove remake, Blood Meridian, A Fistful Of Dollars remake, Horizon: Chapter 2, The Dark Tower TV Show, Butch & Sundance, Flint, The Magnificent Seven TV Show, Wind River 2 and many more, as well as new Westerns starring Tim Blake Nelson, Kevin Costner, Scott Eastwood, Kiefer Sutherland, Wes Studi, Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Pine."

For my personal tastes there are a few too many "neo-Westerns" here (although I love Yellowstone... and there's an abundance of Yellowstone-adjacent projects on this list) and, maybe, not enough classic, period Westerns.

"Get Off Your Horse and Paint Your Miniatures!"

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, wargame producer Great Escape Games has released three special collections of miniatures for its bestselling Western skirmish system Dead Man's Hand over the past few months.

The most recent, Put Up Yer Dukes, came out just the other day - offering five figures that encapsulate the iconic stature of John Wayne in the Western mythos.

To be honest, I'd have snatched this up just for The Shootist miniature, it being one of my all-time favourite Westerns, but I was buying up the sets as they were released anyway.

Prior to this we had The Quick and The Lead, which gave us miniatures for eight of the main characters in Sam Raimi's excellent Western The Quick and The Dead, as well as self-contained rules for running movie-style duels.

And the first of these bonus sets was A Fistful of Clints, five miniatures depicting classic characters portrayed by Clint Eastwood.

All the sets, of course, come with the requisite cards so you can use the miniature characters as "Legends of The West" (special characters) on your table.

While I may have picked up each one of these sets when they were released, so far I have only gotten my Clints painted by Matt:

My Fistful of Clints

I'm a long way from getting an actual game of Dead Man's Hand up and running, but I'm already entertaining ideas of battles just involving the characters from these three sets.

I really like what Great Escape Games has been doing with these sets and really hope they continue with this line: I'd pay good money for a Kevin Costner-inspired set, for instance.

Best Westerns of This Decade (So Far)

The Just Westerns YouTube channel shares a breakdown of its top Western films and TV shows released between 2020 and 2025.

There's plenty of great material here to add to your "must watch" list.

Historian Rates Nine American Civil War Battles In Movies

Garry Adelman, a historian, rates nine American Civil War battles in movies.

He comments on the Civil War-era artillery and rifles on display in Free State of Jones (2016), starring Matthew McConaughey; and Emancipation (2022), starring Will Smith. 

He explains the use of dynamite and other explosives seen in Cold Mountain (2003), starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renée Zellweger; Sahara (2005), starring Matthew McConaughey; and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967), starring Clint Eastwood.

He breaks down the military strategy seen in the battle scenes in Glory (1989), starring Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington; Gettysburg (1993), starring Jeff Daniels; and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, and Tommy Lee Jones. 

And finally, he separates fact from fiction regarding Civil War-era surgeries as seen in Dances with Wolves (1990), starring Kevin Costner.

Adelman is the chief historian at the American Battlefield Trust. He has also been a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg National Military Park for 27 years.

Behind-The-Scenes of Open Range

Open Range is a beautifully made, underrated Western movie directed by and starring Kevin Costner as Charley Waite, alongside Robert Duvall as Boss Spearman.

So this documentary will break down 20 things you probably never knew about Open Range (2003), covering all the most interesting easter eggs, references and behind the scenes stories from the making of this modern western, including the reference to Unforgiven that you missed, how the movie interfered with Quentin Tarantino and why Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall were secretly in a whole lot of pain for most of their scenes.

Man of Steel (2013)

With the next iteration of Superman just around the corner, I've decided to take a whistle-stop tour through the Snyderverse take on the iconic character. 

I started with my first ever rewatch of Man of Steel, which I haven't seen since I originally saw it on its home video release and was simultaneously awed by the spectacle and disappointed by the story.

Now, removed from that original atmosphere by many years I find myself pleasantly surprised.

Man of Steel is a lot better than I remember it.

However, it still has an unforgivable problem in its finale: the Superman I grew up reading doesn't kill.

He always finds a different way to deal with a problem.

How else could he have resolved the situation? I don't know, I'm not Superman (Henry Cavill).

That's one of the things that makes him Superman and makes him better than General Zod (Michael Shannon).

The fact that he doesn't see that is due in part to the strange attitude his human-father, Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner), tried to instil in young Clark Kent that he had to guard the secret of his abilities at all costs, even if it meant letting people die.

But again, a young Superman should have been able to find a way to save people and conceal his super powers at the same time.

Outside this rather major character flaw, Zack Snyder delivers a fantastic, action-packed, superhero origin story, from David Goyer's scipt.

I had totally forgotten the impressive, alien-realisation of Krypton at the start of the movie, before his biological father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and mother Lara (Ayelet Zurer) send their infant child off into space just ahead of the planet's destruction.

If this Superman had gained better box office traction and been allowed to run through multiple sequels, I would have loved to have seen - somehow - a revisit to Krypton as envisaged by Zack Snyder.

Henry Cavill cuts a fine, square-jawed, figure as Superman when dressed in the red and blue costume, and there are moments when you get fleeting reminders of Christopher Reeve (the definitive live-action Superman).

I even found myself warming up to Amy Adams as Lois Lane. Again, she's no Margot Kidder, but actually following the growth of the character, and her relationship with Clark/Superman, I realised that she was more 'Lois Lane' than maybe I had previously given her credit for.

One of the issues I've had with the Snyderverse was the grey and grim filter everything appears through, but approaching this with an open mind - and eyes - I've come to appreciate the fact that, taking the film as a whole, it isn't as grim as the initial trailers portrayed it.

The film still errs towards Zack's trademark grey palette a bit too much on occasion, and there are too many grey/black costumes for my liking, but the story is much stronger than I recall from my previous viewing. And story, ultimately, always triumphs for me.

Man of Steel is flawed, but it isn't quite the "style-over-substance" affair it was originally painted as.

That said, collateral structural damage has always been a given in comics and films when it comes to monumental superhero slugfests, but the destruction wrought in Man of Steel is off the chart.

Smallville is pretty much laid waste in the initial attack by Zod and his fellow Kryptonians (and a significant amount of it is caused by Superman himself), but then when the fight moves to Metropolis, the devastation gets cranked up to 11.

I know Superman ultimately saved the people of the city (and thus Earth), but, seriously, they need to look around themselves and tally the cost. Who pays for all that damage? I bet 'superhero fight damage' isn't covered by insurance.

I realise that this was his first battle, but you'd think the US Government - or the United Nations - might suggest some kind of training course, to reduce the large-scale collateral damage in any future superpowered conflicts.

Open Range (2003)

It's 1882 and Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall), a wise old cowboy, and his team are leading their herd of free-grazing cattle across Montana when they run afoul of local cattle baron Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon).

Spearman's three-man crew consists of taciturn Charley Waite (Kevin Costner), the gentle giant Mose (Abraham Benrubi), and young Button (an early performance from Diego Luna, the future Cassian Andor).

Baxter wants the free-grazers gone from his territory around the town of Harmonville (so he can steal their cattle) and sets his own men on sorting out "the problem". 

Mose is murdered and Button severely injured - but the worst injustice is the shooting of Waite's old dog, Tig.

This is the classic John Wick inciting incident 11 years before John Wick entered our lives.

Dogs play a pivotal role in this tale as, later on, Charley saving a puppy from drowning helps persuade the town's inhabitants that maybe he and Spearman aren't the "big bads" that Baxter seeks to portray them as.

Needing medical aid for the wounded Button, Charley and Spearman meet Doc Barlow (Dean McDermott) and his beautiful sister, Sue (Annette Bening), who they mistake for his wife for the longest time.

Once this mistake is corrected it opens the door for a sweet, low-key romance to blossom between Charley and Sue, against the backdrop of the increasing tension - and inevitable showdown - between the free-herders and the cattle baron.

Everything comes to a head in a gorgeously choreographed gun battle in the streets of Harmonville, that sees - as it goes on - more and more of the town's residents taking the side of Charley and Spearman against their oppressive, vicious "overlord".

I like a lot of Westerns, of all stripes, but I have to admit that Open Range is up there among my favourites.

Beautifully directed by Costner himself, from a smart and engaging script by Craig Storper (based upon The Open Range Men by by Lauran Paine), this is one of those near-perfect Westerns that has it all.

Costner and Duvall are phenomenal as the pair of aging cattlemen, bickering like an old married couple, and still finding out about each other's backstories a decade into their friendship. 

The realisation, with this viewing, of who was playing Button certainly added a unique spin on the movie (when I last saw it Andor and Rogue One weren't even part of the Star Wars Universe), but the thing that had stuck with me all these years was the incredibly sound effects, particularly during the final gunfight.

I've always had a bit of thing about high-quality movie sound effects (I've long been a bit of a Ben Burtt stan - again with the Star Wars reference - and I like to think in a different life I'd have been a Foley artist) and the first time I heard the gun shots in that extended, final sequence I was gobsmacked by the vividness of the sound.

Watching the movie this week, I was again struck by the work of Open Range's sound team, but also the realisation that there is so much more to the movie than just the epic conclusion.

The former gunslinger who has turned his back on his old ways but is forced to confront those urges by circumstances beyond his control sounds like a Western cliché, but Storper's script does a grand job - thanks to top-quality directing and impeccable performances - of diving deep into the character's psyche and justifying their actions.

The History Channel Turns West This May

America's History Channel is promoting a couple of imminent Western-themed docuseries that are right up my alley, although I have been informed that over here in the UK we're going to have to wait until September to see them both.

Stateside, the eight-part series Kevin Costner's The West begins on May 26, while the two-part Sitting Bull debuts the following day, May 27.

Horizon - An American Saga, Chapter One (2024)

This week I sat down to watch, in a single sitting, Kevin Costner's immersive three-hour long Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One and it was an amazing viewing experience... except for the fact that it's not a complete story.

If I knew Chapter Two was just around the corner I wouldn't be so concerned - as this chapter ended with a tantalising montage of images of 'things to come'.

But, seemingly hoist by its own petard, this epic tale (which is eventually planned to consist of four similar-length movies) failed to draw the box office Warner Bros was hoping for (possibly because it wasn't a complete story), so Chapter Two was pulled from its original release date last August and has yet to be rescheduled.

Hopefully, it'll see the light of day sometime soon, as writer-director Costner is still pressing on with all four chapters and I, sincerely, want him to see them through to completion, so we can all share in his cinematic vision.

As it stands as a solo picture, there is no three-act structure in this first chapter's intricate web of  storylines, about disparate groups of people in the 19th Century trying to establish the frontier town of Horizon in Arizona, the heart of Apache territory.

We have a beginning, but it's clearly a long journey to the final act... which we may never actually see.

Which begs the question: why wasn't this produced as a high-quality HBO-style limited series instead?

With a season of 10 to 12 hour-(or so)-long episodes, the same ground could have been covered and we would have been guaranteed a satisfying conclusion (just look at last year's Shōgun). 

In many ways, Horizon reminded me of the 70's miniseries Centennial, which played a formative role in my developing love of the Western, despite me being a pasty greenhorn who rarely leaves his home.  

Like modern televisual sagas, in Horizon we are introduced to a multitude of characters, and seemingly disjointed storylines, and it takes a good hour, at least, until you begin to see how these will interweave. 

Personally, this didn't bother me, as I have faith in Costner and was simply enjoying the verisimilitude of his balanced portrayal of the Old West.

But, again, I can see why people expecting a 'complete story', even though the film is clearly labelled Chapter One, might have been frustrated.

I'm hoping that by supporting this first outing, even in my small way, and encouraging others to do the same, I can demonstrate to the bean counters and 'powers that be' that this kind of epic, sprawling Western still has a place, and an audience, in the 21st Century.

This was Costner's first directing gig since 2003's Open Range, which is one of my favourite Westerns, so I was definitely bringing my bias to this tale.
 
Even this early in 2025, Horizon - An American Saga, Chapter One could have been a strong contender for being one of my films of the year (let's be honest, it kept my bum in my seat for three hours, which is almost unheard of) if I was more confident that we would eventually see the whole story.

• Horizon - An American Saga, Chapter One is available for purchase in the UK on Sky Store (where I got it) and Prime Video.