Christian Bale is now known to be an Oscar-winning actor (The Fighter) and the face of some major franchises (The Dark Knight trilogy, Terminator Salvation), but that doesn’t mean he’s had a flawless run at the box office. More often than not, Bale’s career has had to endure the turbulence of hit-and-miss runs at the box office. That said, he’s also been one of the best examples of an actor who’s benefited from the cult-hit success of home releases: American Psycho (2000), Batman Begins, and 3:10 to Yuma are all films that didn’t do much in theaters and are now beloved entries on Bale’s filmography. And that trend continues this year, as a Christian Bale movie that flopped in theaters has come out of nowhere and is now shooting up the Netflix streaming charts.
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Hostiles (2017) is one of the collaborations between Christian Bale and writer/director Scott Cooper, with the two having also worked together on Cooper’s second film, Out of the Furnace, and the more recent film adaptation of The Pale Blue Eye (2022). However, while Cooper has gotten mainstream attention (and acclaim) for films like Black Mass, or his strange horror tale Antlers, Hostiles has been the most overlooked movie in his filmography – at least until now.
Hostiles only made a reported $35.7 million on a budget that was estimated to be somewhere between $40-$50M. And yet, since being released on Netflix on August 21st, Hostiles has shot up the streaming service’s charts to the No. 6 spot in the US. That seems to be due to a combination of streaming viewers coming to the late-game realization that Cooper made another quality film; more importantly, film fans are getting somewhat gobsmacked by the realization that the film has an unbelievably stacked cast, beyond Bale.
Hostiles‘ Incredible Cast Deserved Better
Hostiles stars Christian Bale as Capt. Joseph J. Blocker, a U.S. Army Captain living in 1892. Blocker is ordered to escort an old wartime foe, Cheyenne war chief Yellow Hawk (Last of the Mohicans’ Wes Studi), and some of his family from New Mexico Territory back to their tribal lands in Montana. Along the way, the party encounters a woman named Rosalee Quaid (Rosamund Pike), whose entire family has just been slaughtered by a Comanche war party roving the frontier. They take the distraught lady with them and set off for the fort where they are to deliver Yellow Hawk. What follows is a dark Western drama that sees various factions of the army, the former Confederacy, Native American tribes, fur traders, and other socio-political elements of American culture of the time all colliding, in a brutal and unfliching look at life in that era.
In addition to Christian Bale, Wes Studi, and Rosamund Pike, Hostiles also features an unbelievable cast of talent that came together. The list includes Jesse Plemons (Breaking Bad, Fargo), Rory Cochrane (Dazed and Confused, Argo), Jonathan Majors (Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania), and Timothée Chalamet (Dune) as members of Blocker’s army detail to escort Yellow Hawk home. That supporting cast is filled with actors who are each acclaimed (if not award-nominated) in their own rights. Other cast members include veterans like Peter Mullan ( Braveheart, Trainspotting), Bill Camp ( Vice, Joker), Stephen Lang (James Cameron’s Avatar movies), Q’orianka Kilcher (Yellowstone, The New World), Paul Anderson (Peaky Blinders), and a final performance from Scott Wilson (In the Heat of the Night, Junebug).
If you can’t tell by the list above, watching Hostiles today is almost a game of spotting who’s who among the thick ensemble. Beyond that, shows like Yellowstone and its spinoffs (1883, 1923) have shifted the landscape of entertainment back toward grand Western sagas with a modern grit and edge to them. Looking back, Hostiles (2017) was just ahead of its time when it hit theaters; today, it’s the perfect kind of film for modern Western fans to rediscover. Have you checked it out yet?
Hostiles is streaming on Netflix.
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Image courtesy of Focus Features. -
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