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The following does contain a few spoilers so if you haven’t seen Cowboys & Aliens then stick with a sci-fi western that worked; watch Back to the Future Part III instead.

Back in May 1997, having already sold the rights to Men in Black to Sony Columbia, Platinum Studios’ Scott Mitchell Rosenberg was at the William Morris Agency pitching ideas for unpublished comic books that could potentially be made into films. One such idea included concept art, with Rosenberg showing off a poster of a cowboy on horseback pointing his gun at a huge looming spaceship. The title was Cowboys & Aliens. William Morris agents Alan Gasmer and Rob Carlson quickly managed to sell this “concept” to Universal and DreamWorks, with Steve Oedekerk attached to write and direct the film. Not long after, writers Jeffrey Boam and Chris Hauty came to work on the script, taking it in a very dark direction. Then in 1999 Wild Wild West happened and production slowed to a crawl. In 2002, David Hayter delivered a draft of the script that was considered so dark and serious that it would be unfilmable.

During the summer of 2004, production shifted to Sony Columbia. In an interview with Comic Book Resources, Rosenberg said, “We have a great relationship with [DreamWorks], but on Cowboys & Aliens it turned out that the kind of take we wanted and the take they wanted were different. So, we asked them and contractually they didn't have to, but because of the relationship, they said okay and we were able to move to Sony.” Rosenberg and Sony Columbia wanted to make it more comedic and so this time the script went through Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and Thompson Evans. The lack of momentum meant that the project was soon dropped. However, Rosenberg’s Cowboys & Aliens was eventually published as a graphic novel in 2006.

In 2007, Imagine Entertainment’s Ron Howard came across the graphic novel and was sold on the cover image. “The cover sort of said it all,” said Howard. “I thought it was great. I’d heard that Steven [Spielberg] had developed it for a while…I got one of the scripts, and I looked at it, and I had a point of view about how you could recalibrate the tone of it and the balance. We got together and had a talk about it.” Universal and DreamWorks were suddenly back in the game, with Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer on board as producers.

“I had given up on the project until Ron rekindled the idea,” said Spielberg. “He brought a whole bunch of new elements that we had not considered the first time we developed the screenplay…the script that we developed was much more tongue-in-cheek…it didn’t have much of the traditional western about it.” Iron Man writers Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus were hired to go over the script. This time the writers had an actual graphic novel to work from rather than just a title and an image.

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