The Western genre will never completely die, and though it will certainly never see a saturation of the market like it had in the 1950s and 1960s, it does go in cycles and there is always something out there on the horizon. This past year was unusual, in a good way, in that there were four good Westerns released:
Slow West,
Bone Tomahawk,
The Hateful Eight, and
The Revenant, the latter of which received the most Oscar nominations of any movie released in 2015 and is surely going to win some of the biggies in a couple weeks. If it manages to win Best Picture it will be only the fourth from the genre to do so (joining
Unforgiven, Dances with Wolves and
Cimarron).
Jane Got A Gun, though I didn't much care for it, was already released in January of this year, and Antoine Fuqua's
Magnificent Seven remake with Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke and others will likely be ready before the year is out.
Since this thread was started in 2004 there have been some really good Westerns made, including
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,
Django Unchained,
The Proposition,
The Homesman, and Joel and Ethan Coen's
True Grit remake which was both a decent money maker and garnered ten Oscar nominations including Best Picture. And though a modern-day Western,
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is still one of my very favorite films of the 21st Century. The
3:10 to Yuma remake, though not for me, did pretty well, and smaller indies have used the genre too like
Meek's Cutoff,
Seraphim Falls,
Blackthorne, and
The Appaloosa (2006).
There have certainly been some expensive duds, too, like the 2004 remake of
The Alamo which was very, very costly and made almost nothing at the box office (to be fair, it was pretty bad), the long awaited adaptation of the
Jonah Hex comic book was a big ol' stinker, and the highest profile mistake was Gore Verbinski's energetic action movie reboot of
The Lone Ranger, which though probably not as bad as its reputation was certainly not the franchise creator all involved were sure it would be, which was a shame because Verbinski had played with the genre in such a fun way in the animated
Rango beforehand. Other embarrassing uses of the genre included the laughless comedies
A Million Ways to Die in the West and
The Ridiculous 6. But even when they suck, I do like the idea that genre is still out there.
Whether
The Revenant wins Best Picture or not, as much as I like it is nowhere near contention for my personal top five or ten Westerns, but I hope the high profile it and Tarantino's last two movies (though he is practically a genre unto himself) have gotten is getting younger moviegoers or people who haven't explored Westerns much or at all to go back and discover the classics and then to dive deep and really have fun with what this particular subset of the artform has produced.
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As you stated some really solid entries came out this last year.
