Unforgiven Clint Eastwood

Box office

The film debuted at the top position in its opening weekend.[20][21] Its earnings of $15 million ($7,252 average from 2,071 theaters) in its opening weekend was the best-ever opening for a Clint Eastwood film at that time.[22] This was also the highest August opening weekend, holding that record until it was surpassed a year later by The Fugitive.[23] It spent a total of three weeks as the No. 1 film in North America. In its 35th weekend (April 2–4, 1993), capitalizing on its Oscar wins, the film returned to the Top 10 (spending another three weeks total there), ranking at No. 8 with a gross of $2.5 million ($2,969 average from 855 theaters), an improvement of 197 percent over the weekend before where it made $855,188 ($1,767 average from 484 theaters). The film closed on July 15, 1993, having spent nearly a full year in theaters (343 days / 49 weeks), having earned $101.2 million in North America, and another $58 million internationally for a total of $159.2 million worldwide.[24]

Critical response

Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports an approval rating of 96% based on 109 reviews, and an average rating of 8.80/10. The website's critical consensus states: "As both director and star, Clint Eastwood strips away decades of Hollywood varnish applied to the Wild West, and emerges with a series of harshly eloquent statements about the nature of violence."[25] Metacritic gave the film a score of 85 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[26] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[27]

Jack Methews of the Los Angeles Times described Unforgiven as "the finest classical western to come along since perhaps John Ford's 1956 The Searchers." Richard Corliss in Time wrote that the film was "Eastwood's meditation on age, repute, courage, heroism—on all those burdens he has been carrying with such grace for decades."[22] Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert criticized the work, though the latter gave it a positive vote, for being too long and having too many superfluous characters (such as Harris' English Bob, who enters and leaves without meeting the protagonists). Despite his initial reservations, Ebert eventually included the film in his "The Great Movies" list.[28]

Unforgiven was named one of the ten best films of the year on 76 critics' lists, according to a poll of the nation's top 106 film critics.[29]

Accolades

American Film Institute recognition

In June 2008, Unforgiven was listed as the fourth best American film in the Western genre (behind The Searchers, High Noon, and Shane) in the American Film Institute's "AFI's 10 Top 10" list.[47][48]

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – #98
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – #68

Legacy

The music for the Unforgiven film trailer, which appeared in theatres and on some of the DVDs, was composed by Randy J. Shams and Tim Stithem in 1992. The main theme song, "Claudia's Theme", was composed by Clint Eastwood.[49]

The film was planned to be used as the theme for Six Flags Great Adventure's then-upcoming roller coaster, but market research showed that people found it to be too dark of a theme, so the ride's name was changed to Viper.[50]

In 2004, Unforgiven was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked Peoples' script for Unforgiven as the 30th greatest ever written.[51]

Several story elements of the film are paralleled in "The Noblest of Men, and a Woman", a side-quest in the 2018 video game Red Dead Redemption 2, including an English Bob-like former gunfighter having his biography written by a naive journalist, the player having to visit an aging outlaw who runs a pig farm, the gunfighter revealing himself to be a complete fraud, a final shootout where the player kills him, and the journalist deciding to write a fictional account of the gunfighter's death that completely ignores the truth of what really happened.