'Yellowstone' Meets 'War Machine' in Daniel Craig's Sci-Fi Flop Officially Coming to Netflix

Westerns and alien invasion movies don't tend to occupy the same universe, but Jon Favreau (Iron Man) apparently saw no reason why cowboys couldn't swap cattle rustlers for extraterrestrials. He then threw James Bond and Indiana Jones into the Wild West and dropped in some aliens, and you've basically got Yellowstone crashing headfirst into Alan Ritchson's War Machine.

The resulting Cowboys & Aliens is officially getting another chance on Netflix, with the streamer having added the 2011 sci-fi Western to its U.S. library on October 1. The film begins in 1875. New Mexico Territory. A stranger with no memory of his past stumbles into the hardscrabble desert town of Absolution. The only hint to his history is a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. What he discovers is that the people of Absolution don’t welcome strangers, and nobody makes a move on its streets unless ordered to do so by the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). It’s a town that lives in fear. But Absolution is about to experience fear it can scarcely comprehend as the desolate city is attacked by marauders from the sky. Screaming down with breathtaking velocity and blinding lights to abduct the helpless one by one, these mysterious visitors challenge everything the residents have ever known.

The cast is led by Ford as Dolarhyde and Daniel Craig (No Time to Die) as the stranger, Jake Lonergan, alongside Olivia Wilde (Tron: Legacy) as Ella Swenson, Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) as Doc, Adam Beach (Flags of Our Fathers) as Nat Colorado, Paul Dano (The Batman) as Percy Dolarhyde, Keith Carradine (Dexter) as Sheriff John Taggart, and Clancy Brown (The Shawshank Redemption) as Meacham.

How Good Is 'Cowboys & Aliens'?

This is where the whole experiment came unstuck. Cowboys & Aliens currently holds a 44% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes, alongside a 43% audience score. Critics generally liked Craig and Ford but were considerably less convinced by the movie's attempts to make its Western and sci-fi halves play nicely together. And this was a big disappointment, too. Cowboys & Aliens earned $100.2 million domestically and approximately $163 million worldwide, a poor result for a movie carrying a reported budget well north of $100 million.

Cowboys & Aliens began streaming on Netflix in the United States on October 1.