Jude Law’s Forgotten Yet Revolutionary $170 Million Western Is Streaming for Free

Arguably one of the most overlooked mainstream hits of the 21st century, the Western drama Cold Mountain wasn’t merely a box office blockbuster, but it also featured a stacked cast and earned as many as seven Oscar nominations. Cold Mountain is rarely discussed these days, but audiences who never had the opportunity to watch it can do so (for free) on the Pluto TV streaming service this month. Remember, the movie will leave Pluto at the end of December, so now’s the time to head toward it. Directed by the late Anthony Minghella, who was coming off of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain was released in 2003, and featured Jude Law, Renée Zellweger, Nicole Kidman, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in its star-studded cast.

Interestingly, the supporting cast included the likes of Brendan Gleeson, Natalie Portman, Charlie Hunnam, Giovanni Ribisi, Kathy Baker, Jack White (yes, that one), Donald Sutherland, and Cillian Murphy. The movie cost around $80 million to produce, and grossed around $170 million at the global box office. It won Zellweger an Oscar for her supporting performance and now sits at a 69% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus reads: “The well-crafted Cold Mountain has an epic sweep and captures the horror and brutal hardship of war.” Cold Mountain was shot by Mad Max: Fury Road‘s John Seale.

Laptops! QuickTimes! DVDs! ‘Cold Mountain’ Was Cutting Edge for Its Time

It was edited by the great Walter Murch, best known for his work on Apocalypse Now and The Godfather. Fun fact: Cold Mountain was the first major studio film of its size to be edited on Apple’s Final Cut Pro, as opposed to the far more cumbersome Avid systems that the industry was used to. In a 2003 interview with Post, Murch spoke about how editing the movie on a store-bought computer had changed his process. He said:

“It’s good that there are alternate systems out there, and I had my eye on Final Cut for a number of years. It’s a software-only system, so it can immediately take advantage of improvements in hardware. Immediately you can use the G5, which has just come into availability. You can transfer the material and carry it around with you on a laptop. On a different level, Final Cut is a non-proprietary system — it uses QuickTime to convey images and sounds, and it’s a universally used system for file exchanges of images and sounds on the Internet, CDs and DVDs. It’s a very transparent system for dealing with the outside world coming into the system and going from the system back to the outside world.”

You can watch Cold Mountain for free on Pluto TV till the end of the month, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.