- Yes
- No
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Did the SW genre become too big with stories that have no place in a true spaghetti western?
The taste of the mainstream audience changed over the time. The interest in classical SWs got lost , so the filmmakers have to change their point of view in storytelling. The results are comedies and stories far away of the “standard SW narrative". Don’t forget, that SW-Producers wanted to make money. They always wanted to please their paying customers.
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Market oversaturation - but that’s how the Italians work. Something makes money and then churn out hundreds of imitations until audiences have had enough. The peplum years were 1959-1964; The giallo was 1969-1974; the Italian westerns 1964-1973 so they got 10 years out of it.
70 movies a year being released in 1967/68 - more than 1 a week. Audiences couldn’t keep up and the box-office average dropped leading to a fall in production. In contrast in the UK Hammer and its imitators made about 100 British horror movies 1957-1974. Versus 500-600 spaghetti westerns in 10 years.
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Also, the economy changed. Italy went from a dirt poor country with a movie theater in every cow town to an industrializing country and at some point television killed the movie star…
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The people in Italy suffered. There were fascist and socialist terrorism. They didnt want any brutal SWs anymore. That’s one of the reasons why they prefered more comedy based movies than before. And this was the reason why comedy SWs had a big time. It’s political motivated, I guess. Equal to Germany, in these times the RAF was killing a lot of people. So the people want to watch more comedies as a compensation for all that danger.