John Hillcoat wants to make revenge Western with Christian Bale?

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

Despite the problems I had with his adaptation of The Road (in truth, the novel was almost unfilmable) - John Hillcoat is a name that excites me in the industry, and the news that he is prepping a frontier western with Christian Bale as potentially his next movie has me kinda giddy.

Maybe it's those new Leone blu-rays, or that awesome Red Dead Redemption video game or maybe the fact that Jonah Hex looks uglier than Eli Wallach and we deserve better, I don't know. But I'm in the mood right now for a bleak Western revenge movie and I'm betting my fistful of dollars that if a studio shows some big brass and gives it the greenlight, this movie could be something special.

The movie is The Revenant, based on a 1800's set frontier revenge novel by Michael Punke that would later be turned into a 2007 Hollywood Black Listed screenplay by Mark L. Smith. Set in 1820, Bale would play Hugh Glass, a frontiersman looking looking for vengeance against those who attacked him and left him for dead during a bar fight. Granted, hardly original stuff in the genre but as with any story, it's the way it's told that is important. You just need to look at Hillcoat's The Proposition to see what he can do with a seemingly simple tale of revenge. A lack of funding from studio's has kept the project grounded for the past three years despite some flirtation from Samuel L. Jackson to lead, and Chan-Wook Park to direct in the past, the latter I guess not ALL that surprising - despite it's American setting given the heavy emphasis on revenge in his filmography. Now with an A-lister like Bale on board, perhaps now is the time for a studio to come up with the cash on this genre (though Bale couldn't save the failures of the Western 3:10 to Yuma, and indeed Terminator Salvation) so who knows if The Revenant has a chance? The following stat info is taken from The Numbers; The worrying figure is the yearly percentage total. Not one movie in the past 15 years has hit 1% of the year's overall box office revenue. Studio's are rarely greenlighting Western movies, and when they do - it's unusual for them to see a return. And indeed Hillcoat himself has had great difficulty in funding movies during the recession even outside the Western. His high profile failure to get The Promised Land (a crime thriller set during the depression era, based on the novel The Wettest County in the World) off the ground despite the amazing cast of Shia Labeouf, Ryan Gosling, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Dano, Amy Adams and Michael Shannon a was truly a sign of where the industry is right now. And in this town, there probably isn't room for a Hillcoat directed Western, even with Christian Bale attached.