6 Westerns You Need To Watch, According To Taylor Sheridan

Published Sep 13, 2026, 7:21 AM EDT

Senior Music Editor at Screen Rant, Sarah's love of sound and story drive the beat. A globetrotting brand whisperer and award-winning journalist, she’s built cross-cultural narratives around the world—but music has always been her true north. She launched DJ Mag North America, successfully introducing the iconic UK brand to the U.S. market. Previously, she carved a space for EDM inside the pages of VIBE, blending electronic and hip-hop culture long before it was trendy.
 

Taylor Sheridan did not invent the modern Western, although Yellowstone's dominance has made it feel that way. Long before the Duttons took over television, Sheridan was absorbing the movies and filmmakers that defined the genre for him, from Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner to some of the biggest Westerns of the 1980s and '90s.

His taste also explains quite a bit about his own work. Sheridan tends to favor Westerns where violence has consequences and the people fighting over the land matter more than the gunfights themselves. That puts much of his work firmly in the tradition of revisionist Westerns that question the genre's old ideas about heroes, justice, and the frontier.

Sheridan never handed anyone a convenient numbered list of his favorite Westerns, so we won't be pretending he did. Instead, these are six Westerns he has personally praised, called influential, or held up as examples of the genre at its best. Several also happen to be the kind of suspenseful Westerns that prove the genre can be just as tense as any thriller, which probably helps explain why Sheridan keeps coming back to them.

Silverado

Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado arrived in 1985, when Hollywood Westerns were far less common than during the genre's golden age. Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Danny Glover, and Kevin Costner play four men whose journeys converge in a corrupt frontier town, resulting in the kind of sprawling ensemble Sheridan would eventually build into his own Western stories.

Sheridan specifically mentioned Silverado while discussing the Westerns that shaped him, and he has also spoken about being a longtime admirer of Costner. The actor's impulsive Jake is particularly memorable here, decades before Sheridan cast him as John Dutton in Yellowstone. Silverado embraces the pleasures of a classic Western without ever feeling like a relic.

Dances With Wolves

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  Lieutenant Dunbar

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  Mary McDonnell

  Stands With A Fist

Kevin Costner directed and starred in Dances with Wolves as Union Army lieutenant John Dunbar, whose remote assignment brings him into contact with a Lakota community and gradually changes his understanding of the American frontier. The 1990 epic became a rare Western phenomenon, winning seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Sheridan has said Dances with Wolves had a tremendous impact on cinema, and the attraction makes sense. The movie treats the West as a place where land, settlement, culture, and violence are constantly colliding rather than simply a backdrop for shootouts. Decades later, Sheridan would put Costner at the center of another sweeping story about who gets to control the American West.

Tombstone

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  Wyatt Earp

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  Val Kilmer

  Doc Holliday

Few modern Westerns have held onto their audience quite like Tombstone. Kurt Russell stars as Wyatt Earp, but Val Kilmer nearly steals the movie as Doc Holliday, delivering a performance that helped turn the 1993 film into one of the genre's most endlessly quoted favorites. Sheridan has included Tombstone among the Westerns that strongly influenced him.

The movie combines real historical figures with unapologetically entertaining Hollywood storytelling, allowing it to be brutal one minute and enormously fun the next. Some parts of Tombstone are harder to watch today, while 1967's Hour of the Gun works surprisingly well as an unofficial Tombstone sequel for viewers curious about what happened after the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Lonesome Dove

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  Danny Glover

  Joshua Deets

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  Augustus "Gus" McCrae

Lonesome Dove is technically a television miniseries rather than a movie, but Sheridan himself made the case for including it. When discussing the Westerns that shaped him, he acknowledged the distinction before putting the acclaimed 1989 production in the same category. Based on Larry McMurtry's novel, it follows former Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana.

Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones turn that journey into something far richer than a standard frontier adventure. Sheridan has also cited McMurtry as an important writing influence, particularly admiring how quickly he could establish memorable characters. Anyone familiar with Sheridan's sprawling casts can probably see why that approach stuck with him.

Open Range

• Charley Waite

• Boss Spearman

Sheridan's praise for Open Range is even stronger than his comments about many of the Westerns he has cited as influences. Speaking about Kevin Costner's career, Sheridan called the actor-director's 2003 movie "as good a western as I've ever seen." Costner stars alongside Robert Duvall as free-grazing cattlemen who find themselves in conflict with a ruthless land baron.

The story is straightforward, but the characters and steadily escalating tension give Open Range far more weight than its premise might suggest. It is also one of the most suspenseful Western movies of its era, particularly as it builds toward its climactic gunfight. Sheridan's admiration for Costner's Western work makes their eventual Yellowstone partnership feel almost inevitable.

Unforgiven

• 

  Bill Munny

• 

  Gene Hackman

  Little Bill Daggett

Of all the Westerns Sheridan has discussed, Unforgiven received his clearest endorsement. He has called Clint Eastwood's 1992 masterpiece "the best Western ever made." Eastwood stars as William Munny, a former outlaw reluctantly pulled back into violence for one final job, but the movie refuses to treat his return to killing as anything triumphant.

Instead, Unforgiven examines what violence has done to Munny and everyone around him, stripping away much of the romance older Westerns attached to the gunslinger. The Best Picture winner became one of the defining revisionist Westerns, and Sheridan's admiration for it makes perfect sense. His own Westerns rarely let anyone walk away from violence without paying for it somehow.