After making movies for over 60 years, Steven Spielberg has worked in almost every genre you can imagine. He’s made iconic war films like Saving Private Ryan, he redefined what a special effects-driven blockbuster looked like with Jurassic Park, and he’s directed fantastic dramas like The Color Purple. Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, is about first contact between humankind and extraterrestrials, a favorite topic for him.
But somehow, Spielberg has never directed a Western. That’s about to change. In a profile of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, long a collaborator of Spielberg’s, The Hollywood Reporter mentioned that the director’s next project will be “an untitled Western, the director’s first, which Spielberg hopes to shoot next year.”
Spielberg has mentioned this project before, although he hasn’t given many details. “I can’t reveal anything right now, but I have something in development. And it kicks ass,” the director said at SXSW in March 2026. “There will be horses. There will be guns. There will be no tropes, I can tell you that. There’s going to be no stereotypes.”
The Western is one of the oldest genres in movies, so making one that sidesteps the usual tropes and stereotypes will be no easy task. But if anybody can do it, it might be the man who made towering classics like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and many more.
Although Spielberg has never technically directed a Western, he has produced a number of them. The most straightforward is Into the West, a six-episodes miniseries that aired on TNT in 2005. A sprawling series that covers some of the most well-known events in the development of the West, the show remains well-regarded even today. Spielberg has also produced movies that are Western-adjacent, like Back to the Future Part III and Cowboys & Aliens.
It’s surprising that Spielberg has never actually directed a Western considering his obvious admiration of the genre. He’s talked before about his appreciation for the works of directors like Howard Hawks (Rio Bravo, Red River) and John Ford (Stagecoach, The Searchers). Ford even appears at the end of Spielberg’s 2022 film The Fabelmans, where the legendary director is played by the late David Lynch. In 2025, Spielberg said that he still has “an appetite for a Western, which I will someday hopefully do. It’s something that’s eluded me for all of these decades.”
For his part, Janusz Kaminski is already thinking about how to depict the landscape in this upcoming Western, using his homeland of Poland as a reference. “We used to go to this region in the Sudeten Mountains, where it was just beautiful, rolling hills, looked like parts of Montana. The lay of the land, the snow on the ground, the fog,” he said.
If Spielberg’s new western shoots in 2027, the earliest it’s likely to open in movie theaters is 2028. We’ll be on the lookout for more information.
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