in the lead, Jon Favreau jumped in to direct, Downey left, and finally, in early 2010, nearly a decade and a half after Rosenberg first conceived it, the film began production, ultimately to boast a fucking insane roster of A-list writers: besides Oedekerk, the story is credited to Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus, two members of the equally huge team it took to get Children of Men off the ground (though they are here as Favreau's boys, having also contributed to the first Iron Man). He left, the project lied dormant for ages, Rosenberg adapted it into a comic book in 2006, it got revived with Robert Downey, Jr. The story's genesis is absurdly long for such an elemental concept: in 1997, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg of Malibu Comics sold the idea to Universal Pictures, which was originally to be written and directed by Steve Oedekerk.
Though whereas Hot Tub Time Machine in particular compounded that problem by being not remotely what I think most of us would probably come up with if we were told to come up with a plot for that title, Cowboys & Aliens is quite possibly the most effective marriage of cowboys and aliens that we were likely to get, in the year 2011 anyway I have no real argument against the film's execution of its concept other than that it is brutally boring, and perhaps it is the case that cowboys and aliens is a good idea for a comedy sketch or a video game, but not so much for a 118-minute feature film.
How can you begin to fuck up a movie called Cowboys & Aliens? As it turns out, the same way you fuck up Hot Tub Time Machine, or some people think you fuck up Snakes on a Plane (I myself maintain that the latter film was the best possible version of itself): by coasting on the awe-inspiring cheesy awesomeness of the title, and making something that delivers on what that title promises in the most unimaginatively literal way, while otherwise going through the motions of a particularly unexceptional plot.