Kevin Costner’s First Western Is Now Streaming for Free

Before Yellowstone, Open Range, or even Dances With Wolves, Kevin Costner yeed his first haw in the 1985 Western Silverado. The film helped revitalize the genre in the 1980s, and featured a cast of up-and-coming stars like Danny Glover, Kevin Kline, and Scott Glenn. And now, you can stream it without parting with any of your hard-earned sawbucks: It’s available on the ad-supported free streamer Tubi.

The Western was on its last legs in the 1980s. The once-flourishing genre had been revitalized by the “spaghetti Westerns” of the 1960s and the “acid Westerns” of the 1970s, but new releases during the 1980s were few and far between, partially thanks to the box-office failure of the epic Heaven’s Gate. Lawrence Kasdan, coming off the smash success of The Big Chill, was determined to make a Western that would recapture those from his youth. Reuniting with Kline and Jeff Goldblum, who starred in The Big Chill, and Costner — whose character is the post-mortem focus of the film but whose scenes were all cut — he set out into the New Mexico desert for Columbia Pictures, armed with a lavish $23 million USD budget.