Cowboys & Aliens
Directed by Jon Favreau
Starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, Clancy Brown
Release Date: July 29, 2011

The two genres of film I love the most are science-fiction and westerns. They both speak to my soul and provide fuel for my imagination. When I dream of fantastic adventures, it either involves me traveling through space to magnificent distant worlds or exploring the frontier of a new nation being forged right here on Earth. Combining the two genres into one glorious and entertaining package is like presenting me with the cinematic equivalent of a Reese’s peanut butter cup. It would definitely explain why I love Firefly and its big screen sequel Serenity so dearly. But I love it when a movie crossbreeds genres like that. Among my favorite directors of all time are John Carpenter and Walter Hill, two great filmmakers who made their careers playing around with the archetypes and stylistic flourishes of western storytelling in modern settings. Hill, unlike Carpenter, actually got to make a few honest-to-God westerns in his life. Both the science-fiction and western genres are inhabited with intriguing, larger-than-life characters populating worlds filled with mystery, chaos, and wonder, another great reason why the two distinct genres complement each other so well as long as neither side overwhelms the other over the course of the story. Jon Favreau, no stranger to making films with elements of the fantastic (Elf, Zathura, the Iron Man movies), understands this perfectly and it is that understanding that accounts for a huge part of the success of his latest feature, Cowboys & Aliens.

We’ve heard a lot about the planned trilogy of performance capture Tintin movies being shared between director/producers Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson over the past year or so, and now we finally have a teaser trailer for the first of those three movies, The Adventures of Tintin.

With Jackson now directing the two-part adaptation of The Hobbit, it doesn’t look like he’ll be doing anything more than producing on the Tintin movies, leaving room for someone else to step in and take the job. But for now, the Spielberg-directed first installment looks like a lot of fun.

You can check out the teaser trailer for The Adventures of Tintin by continuing below now!

The first trailer we saw for Cowboys & Aliens, the new comic book movie from Iron Man director Jon Favreau, was pretty impressive and had most buzzing with excitement for the flick.

That was just a taste. Universal Pictures has now released the new theatrical trailer for the movie and…wow. There’s a lot of big movies coming out this summer, but you would not be out of line to say that this looks like one of the most fun and exciting titles on the way.

The movie stars Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Clancy Brown, and Paul Dano, and it’s written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Damon Lindelof.

You can read a detailed synopsis and check out the trailer below right now. Cowboys & Aliens will hit theaters on July 29, 2011.

Director Jon Favreau refused to be outdone today at WonderCon 2011 by the 10-minute Green Lantern clip, so he played a 9-minute reel that included an exclusive first look at the alien from his new film Cowboys & Aliens.

The alien was shown at the end where a toothy looking creature reared its large ugly head into the opening of a cave where people were presumingly trapped inside. I’d say it looked pretty similar to Aliens, but I didn’t get as good of a look as I’d have liked to (side note: thank you person sitting in front of me who had to go to the restroom at the most inopportune time).

The scene started out with Daniel Craig‘s character Jake Lonergan walking up to a building and inspecting to see if anyone else was inside. He enters and starts dressing a wound just as a gun is pointed at his head from behind by Meacham (played by Clancy Brown). “Two kinds of men get shot: criminals and victims. Well, which one are ya?” Meacham says, which Jake replies with “I don’t know.”

As promised, director Jon Favreau has released the Super Bowl TV spot online today for his upcoming film, Cowboys & Aliens.

Watch the commercial here below.

Favreau tweeted earlier today that he would release the video online prior to today’s big game “so that every country can see it at the same time.”

Cowboys & Aliens hits theaters July 29, 2011.