‘The Dark Knight’ Star’s Forgotten Western Bomb Is a Free Streaming Hit

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Cate Blanchett hugging her daughters in The Missing (2003)

Rahul Malhotra is a Weekend News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he'll watch anything once.

He has been writing for Collider for over two years, and has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal to introduce audiences to a whole new world of cinema.

Swing and a miss > measured victory. Also, #JusticeForHan. (He/Him).

Director Ron Howard has dabbled in practically every genre imaginable during his decades-long career as a filmmaker. Most recently, he made the star-studded box office flop Eden, a survival drama based on a true story. Howard has also directed sports films, thrillers, sci-fi spectacles, fantasies, comedies, and more. However, among his most overlooked movies is a Western — The Missing, which garnered attention over two decades ago for its authentic use of the Apache language. The movie was headlined by Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett, who played an estranged father-daughter duo that goes on a mission to rescue kidnapped young girls together. The Missing underperformed at the box office and earned mixed reviews, but it suddenly emerged as a streaming hit recently.

According to FlixPatrol, it was among the most-watched movies on the domestic Tubi charts, when the leader board was topped by the blockbuster sci-fi movie Men in Black. Released in 2003, The Missing also featured Val Kilmer and Aaron Eckhart in supporting roles, and earned under $40 million at the worldwide box office against a reported budget of $60 million. It's now sitting at a 58% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics' consensus reads, "An expertly acted and directed Western. But like other Ron Howard features, the movie is hardly subtle." The late critic Roger Ebert wasn't exactly a fan, writing in his review, "It's such a preposterous setup that I was always aware of the plot chugging away, and the logistics of the chase defy all common sense."

Cate Blanchett Has Had an Odd Run Following 'Tár'

In a retrospective review for Collider, Jacob Dunstan praised Blanchett's performance in the movie, and wrote, "The Missing provided her with the chance to do something physically and emotionally demanding within a decidedly different historical setting. The resultant film is a ripping, arguably underrated psychological Western, and it's up there with Blanchett's best roles of the 2000s." Howard went on to direct that far more mainstream thriller The Da Vinci Code a few years later; it remains his highest-grossing hit, with over $700 million at the global box office. Blanchett's last movie was Steven Soderbergh's espionage thriller Black Bag; before that, she starred in the critical and commercial disaster Borderlands.

You can watch The Missing at home, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.