What killed the western genre?

[Bootes Void]

The western genre used to be very popular prior to the late 60s but it has been basically been dead since. What caused this?

[Agonized-Statism]

A lot of reasons. There was generational turnover, with the genre seen by a lot of boomers as old and worn out and the Wild West itself increasingly removed from cultural memory (those who experienced the frontier were dying off, and the kids and grandkids who grew up on their stories were getting old too). The West was the forefront of the US population boom, no longer an exotic locale, and space had become the new, more exciting frontier to a society enamored with science and progress. The romanticization of the frontier, and the ugliness and genocide that happened there, was confronted by the counterculture. It was harder to film Westerns with so many planes in the sky, and superheroes had finally come back to comics in a big way.

[buritobr]

The wave of the western genre ended because everything has an end.

Sci-fi films were very popular until the late 1990s but also declined since that time.
German Heimatfilm was popular until the late 1960s but doesn't exist anymore.
Italian political cinema was very popular until the 1970s and its importance declined since this date.

[TheReckoning]

Although western’s have gotten less popular, they haven’t necessarily died. I would say Breaking Bad, for example, definitely has traditional “Western” elements to it, if not with modern characteristics.

[PSOL]

The west ceased looking like the “west” of the movies far past the point of its change.