Dances with Wolves (1990)

Dances With Wolves is a 1990 American epic revisionist Western film directed and produced by Kevin Costner in his feature directorial debut. Starring Costner with an ensemble cast including Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene and Rodney Grant, the film is a film adaptation of the 1988 novel Dances With Wolves by Michael Blake (who also wrote the screenplay). It tells the story of Union army Lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Costner), who travels to the American frontier to find a military post and who meets a group of Lakota.

Costner purchased the rights of the novel, with an eye on directing it, after encouraging Blake in early 1986 to turn a Western screenplay into a novel to improve its chances of being produced. The film was initially produced with an initial budget of $15 million, but was finally produced with a $22 million one. The project was turned down by several studios due to the Western genre no longer being popular, as well as the length of the script. After the project languished at both Nelson Entertainment and Island Pictures, Costner and Jim Wilson sold the foreign rights in several countries and obtained enough money to go into pre-production. The two then made a deal with Orion Pictures. Much of the dialogue is spoken in Lakota with English subtitles. Filming occurred from July to November 1989 in South Dakota and Wyoming, and it was translated by Doris Leader Charge, of the Lakota Studies department at Sinte Gleska University.

Dances With Wolves premiered at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. on October 19, and was released in the United States on November 9. The film received positive reviews from critics and audiences, who praised Costner's directing, the performances, screenplay, score, cinematography, and production values. It was a commercial success, grossing $424.2 million worldwide, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1990, as well as the highest-grossing film for Orion Pictures. The film received twelve nominations at the 63rd Academy Awards and won seven awards: Best Picture, Best Director for Costner, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Sound Mixing. The film also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama. It is one of only four Westerns to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, the other three being Cimarron (1931), Unforgiven (1992), and No Country for Old Men (2007).

It is credited as a leading influence for the revitalization of the Western genre of filmmaking in Hollywood. In 2007, Dances With Wolves was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".