Kevin Costner’s “Rare” 10/10 Western Epic Is Streaming for Free

The 1990s weren’t considered a great period for the Western genre, following a heyday that had lasted several decades. That said, a handful of classics emerged in the 1990s, including Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, George Cosmatos’ Tombstone, and Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead.Each of these movies put a unique spin on the genre, which had long been known for its reliance on tropes. The 1990s, therefore, were seen as the era of the “Revisionist Western.” The period began with perhaps the greatest of them all, an epic that few expected to do as well as it did. The movie in question elevated its star to the A-list, and earned him a spot alongside actor-directors such as Eastwood, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty. The film, Dances with Wolves, is now more accessible than ever, as it’s streaming for free in the United States.

The movie was released in 1990 after a troubled production. Kevin Costner had great difficulty getting the project off the ground, as the industry had decided that Westerns had become obsolete. After several stops and starts, the movie opened to positive reviews and was a massive box office success. It grossed more than $420 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of the year, against a reported budget of $22 million. Dances with Wolves is one of the rare Westerns to win the Academy Award for Best Picture,and at the time it was only the second Western ever to do so; it was followed by Unforgiven and No Country for Old Men. The movie now holds a “Certified Fresh” 87% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus reads, “Dances with Wolves suffers from a simplistic view of the culture it attempts to honor, but the end result remains a stirring western whose noble intentions are often matched by its epic grandeur.”