Steven Spielberg’s next movie to rewrite rules of Westerns

Steven Spielberg finally tackles Western after decades of waiting

By Maryam Nadeem March 15, 2026
Steven Spielberg’s next movie to rewrite rules of Westerns
Steven Spielberg’s next movie to rewrite rules of Westerns

Steven Spielberg is finally riding into new territory, and he’s doing it his own way.

The 70-year-old legendary filmmaker has revealed that his next movie will be a Western. 

But fans expecting dusty clichés and familiar cowboy tropes might be surprised, because Spielberg says he’s determined to avoid the genre’s usual stereotypes.

Speaking during a chat with Sean Fennessey at the SXSW on Friday, the Oscar-winning director teased just enough to get movie lovers excited.

“Well, I’m developing a Western,” he said. 

“And it’s gonna have horses. There will be guns. But there’ll be no tropes, I can just tell you that. There are gonna be no stereotypes.”

While Spielberg kept the plot tightly under wraps, the project marks a long-awaited moment in his career. 

Despite decades behind the camera, the director of Jaws and The Fabelmans has never tackled a Western, something he has often said he wanted to do.

During the same conversation, Jurassic Park star also reflected on the struggle to get one of his most beloved films made. 

Long before his blockbuster breakthrough with Jaws, he had pitched the idea for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, only for studios to dismiss it.

“Nobody would let me make it,” he recalled. 

“When I said I wanted to make a UFO movie, people thought it was like something from the National Enquirer.”

But after Jaws became a global phenomenon, everything changed overnight.

Spielberg has long drawn inspiration from classic Western master John Ford, especially films like Stagecoach and The Searchers.

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