10 Reasons You're Wrong About Westerns
2. They've Inspired All Of Your Favorite Films
Anyone who tells you they don't like westerns is kind of lying, at least a little bit.
Because whether they recognize it or not, they do like westerns. You see, from Star Wars to Blade Runner, some of the most highly revered films of all time have been explicitly inspired by the western.
George Lucas famously formed his sci-fi epic after not being able to acquire the rights to a Flash Gordon film but one of the biggest inspirations for the original film was none other than John Ford's The Searchers. Since then, pretty much the entire Star Wars saga has been inspired by westerns in one way or another, including its most recent additions in The Last Jedi or Solo.
Or take, for instance, the Marvel films. As more than a handful of people have pointed out over the years, the superhero genre now is essentially equivalent to what the western was decades ago. However, the MCU specifically seems to have an almost meta-textual awareness of this, with films like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 playing out like love-letters to the western genre itself.
Outside of the MCU, you have films like James Mangold's Logan, which foregrounded the similarities between the genres in an even more overt way.