Why Did The Western Die as a Genre?

It hasn't died as a genre.. see the Hateful 8, Django Unchained, True Grit remake, 310 to Yuma etc. It's popularity has just dimmed in recent decades and replaced by other genre's for the moment. It will be around again.

ETA: It is too enduring of an American genre to die away. It will re-invented, updated, and made fresh for current tastes. See Cowboys and Aliens, Westworld, etc.

The advancement in travel and film technology meant that studios no longer had to rely on affordable, locally shot, Westerns as their go-to fantasy/historical genre.

Changes in social norms made the slaughter of Native Americans less attractive as a film backdrop.

The White Hats vs Black Hats good vs evil no longer played in a society that was exploring every shade of grey.

They didn't die, they just went through a fad where they had an unsustainably high market share similar to that of the superhero movies now.

The market got saturated by loads of low quality stuff as studios tried to get in on the money train, and demand dropped back to normal levels.

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As superheroes, sequels, and international appeal influence Hollywood studios, films from the frontier are riding off into the sunset—just when America needs them most.

Westerns have earned their place at the heart of the national culture and American iconography abroad because they've provided a reliable vehicle for filmmakers to explore thorny issues of American history and character.

Through the past century of Western movies, we can trace America's self-image as it evolved from a rough-and-tumble but morally confident outsider in world affairs to an all-powerful sheriff with a guilty conscience

After World War I and leading into World War II, Hollywood specialized in tales of heroes taking the good fight to savage enemies and saving defenseless settlements in the process.

In the Great Depression especially, as capitalism and American exceptionalism came under question, the cowboy hero was often mistaken for a criminal and forced to prove his own worthiness--which he inevitably did. Over the '50s, '60s, and '70s however, as America enforced its dominion over half the planet with a long series of coups, assassinations, and increasingly dubious wars, the figure of the cowboy grew darker and more complicated.

If you love Westerns, most of your favorites are probably from this era--Shane, The Searchers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the spaghetti westerns, etc. By the height of the Vietnam protest era, cowboys were antiheroes as often as they were heroes.

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Why the Western matters

One of my favorite passages in a novel, the barracks card game in From Here To Eternity by James Jones. (My favorite passage in the passage I bolded)

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"I get my cards," he said and handed Prew the book. "Man, I feel good. I been readin' Tom Mix and the Ralston Straight Shooters. Pow! Pow!" he said, jabbing a forefinger and cocked thumb at the jockstraps and special duty men scattered around on their bunks. "Straight Shooters always win and a nuther thousand yowling redskins bit the dust."

"The Mystery of the Haunted Ranchhouse, starring Tom Mix," Prew read.

"This aint the Ralston Straight Shooters. The Ralston Straight Shooters is an ad."

"So whats the difference? I use to be a Junior G Man onct. It's the same difference. Me and J Edgar was like that. Them drawings really look like old Tom, don't they?"

"I wonder what happened to him? You never see him any more."

"His horse died," Maggio said, "and he had to retire."

'Tony," Readall Treadwell said, coming in from the latrine, a towel wrapped around his big, fat, but heavily muscled under the fat, belly with its navel like a dimple and the hair on it thick enough to comb. "His name was Tony."

"Remember Buck Jones's horse Silver?" Prew said. "There was a real horse."

"Yes, man," Maggio said. "Between Buck and his horse they had the two biggest chests in creation.

"He was a deep sea diver," Readall Treadwell said, sitting down, "before he got in the movies. I read it in a movie magazine. Our Lucky Stars, it was."

"He was a sailor," Maggio said scornfully. "You don't want to believe the crap in them magazines. It's propaganda. He was a sailor and he bummed around some, like Jack London."

"Well anyway," Readall Treadwell said, "when Buck Jones hit them they stayed hit. Deal me in."

"Don't get my goddam blanket wet," Maggio said, "or I'll hit you so you'll stay hit."

"Remember Bob Steele?" Prew said, as Reedy moved to put a paper under him. "He was the one could hit. He was a natural hooker. He was good to watch when he fought, you could tell he been a fighter."

"I seen him in Mice and Men," Maggio said. "He was Curly, the boss's brother-in-law. Boy, he was a mean son of a bitch in that one.

"But he was a good guy in his own pictures though," Readall Treadwell said.

"Sure he was, you jerk," Maggio said disgustedly. "You don't think he'd be the villain when he was the star, do you? I wonder," he said, "what ever happened to old Hoot Gibson? I can just barely remember him. My god, he had grey hair when I was just a kid."

"I think he's dead now," Prew said.

"Jesus," Maggio said. "I wish I had some popcorn."

"Me too," Prew said. "I been wantin' some the last ten minutes." "They got a machine over to the Main PX," Readall Treadwell said hopefully.

"We're broke," Maggio said.

"So'm I," Treadwell said. "If that's what you mean."

"I use to go regular," Maggio said, "every Sataday afternoon and eat popcorn. "Remember Johnny Mack Brown?" Had a southern accent?" Prew said. "And a rawhide hatcord? Let his hat hang down his back half the time?"

"Thats the one," Maggio said. "I wonder what ever happened to him? You never see him any more either."

"You said it a while ago," Prew said, laying down his hand.

"They die. Or graduate. Or retire. What do you say we talk about something else?"

"We gettin' old, men," said Angelo Maggio, aged nineteen and a half. 'T never realized it."

"Tom Tyler," Readall Treadwell said. "He was another one."

"I never liked him," Maggio said. "Too handsome. But I remember him. He plays villains now, in the Technicolor ones. The western epics."

"Sagas," Prew said. "They call them sagas.

"All the regular cowboys got to be musicians now," Prew said. "Musicians first and cowboys second. Because they're not Westerns anymore, they're Musicals," he said, suddenly surprisedly realizing sadly that he had watched and been a part of a phase of America that was dying just as surely as the Plains Indians Wars that gave it birth had died, had watched and been a part of it all this time, without ever knowing it for what it was, or that it was dying.

"You mean Gene Autry," Maggio said. "Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger."

"I read Gene Autry was a Eagle Scout when he was a kid," Readall Treadwell said.

"I believe that," Maggio said. "My hometown, the ony ones ever got to be Eagle Scouts was the preachers' sons and the schoolteachers' sons. I was a Second Class onct myself, till they kicked me out of the Troop for gettin' in a fight with the Assistant Scout Master."

"Gene Autry can't play 'Come to Jesus' in whole notes," Prew said, argumentatively. "Neither one of them can. You can't commercialize that kind of music without killing it."

"Don't look at me," Maggio said. "I don't like them either. You can't commercialize anything without killing it. Look at the radio.."

"But those guys," Prew said irritably, because this was a thing of great importance to him, and because he was trying hard to explain it, to find the word for this that always made him angry, "those guys. They're imitation," he said, finally, lamely.

"John Wayne was another good one," Readall Treadwell said, almost a hunger in his voice, when they stopped laughing.

"Not any more," Maggio said. "He's graduated into Adventure. Give him five more years he'll move up into Drama." "That's the same way Gary Cooper started," Readall Treadwell said. "He really use to be a real cowboy once."

"You can't compare Gary Cooper to John Wayne," Maggio protested.

"I ain't comparing them. All I said was they both started out in Westerns. You can't compare none of them to Gary Cooper."

"I guess not," Maggio said. "I hope not. Gary Cooper goes deeper than just plain adventure. If they's anybody shows all the things this country stands for it's Gary Cooper."

"That's what Hedda Hopper says," Readall Treadwell nodded.

"Hedda Hopper, my arse," Maggio said heatedly. "If I like Gary Cooper it's my business. And it's in spite of Hedda Hopper, not because of Hedda Hopper. Even my old daddy likes Gary Cooper. He go to see him every time he's on, even if it's raining, and he can't speak ten words a English."

"All right," Readall Treadwell said, good naturedly with the strong fat man's unrufflability, and with none of the weak fat man's malice that is the worst malice there is except a woman's malice, Prew thought, a world of difference between fat Reedy and fat Willard, "all right. I jist mention it."

"Well don't mention it," Maggio said.

"All right," Readall Treadwell grinned. "You don't care if I read her column, do you, Angelo? You wont beat me up if I read it will you?"

Maggio grinned, then laughed, the fiery Italian anger gone as quick as it had come. "Sure," he said, "I'll beat you up. You think you'd stand a chance with me? I keep a sawed off pool cue in my wall locker just for guys like you."

"All right," Prew said, "beat him up later. Right now, deal the cards."

I'm almost 40 and none of my friends love westerns. Probably the same reason I don't. They all mostly look the same and sound the same. There's a saloon, a desert landscape, the usual cowboy garb and usual cowboy guns. There's the constant sound of horses clomping through the same looking towns.

Of course the stories vary and some westerns are great but the genre, in similar fashion to mob movies, can seem repetitive and tired to casual audiences.

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The genre as a whole had so many great themes and made for such compelling storytelling.

Just take Logan... It's essentially a western in the vein of Josie Wales, Unforgiving, an obviously Shane, but why do actual old time westerns mostly fail commercially now?

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I wouldn't agree with that premise in the first place. Quite a few of the very best movies made in the last decade are Westerns in almost every sense of the word:

No Country For Old Men
There Will Be Blood
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
True Grit (Coen brothers version)
The Revenant
Hell or High Water
3:10 to Yuma (remake)
Django Unchained
Bone Tomahawk

That's not including one of the better HBO shows that was made in the same period in Deadwood. That 2005 or so to 2017 Western period is a whole hell of a lot better than the previous twelve years or so.

Pretty sure they explain this in simple terms in toy story 2.

It hasn't, just different

I just thought it was the sci fi genre and space exploration that knocked westerns off the pedestal. Toy story kinda gives you an idea of what I mean. Sherrif Woody wasn't the in thing when Buzz Lightyear came around