Kevin Costner has always trusted his instincts and has not been afraid to invest his own money in his projects. He’s been right his fair share of the time. Yellowstone has been a TV and streaming blockbuster. Dances With Wolves won Best Picture and several other Oscars, including Best Director for Costner. Even Waterworld, although initially dismissed by critics and audiences and ridiculed for its outrageous price tag, has eventually recouped its losses and is now recognized as a pretty damned entertaining film, despite some flaws. (Some of the financial info in my review is dated. Wikipedia says, “After factoring in home video sales and TV broadcast rights among other revenue streams, Waterworld eventually became profitable.”)
OK, maybe Costner made some wrong turns along the way. The Postman won several Golden Razzberries including Worst Picture and Worst Director, but even that notorious bomb has a lot of heart.
Now Costner has invested his big heart and his big bank balance into Horizon, an epic four-part series of Westerns. Part 1 just came out. How did it go? Not so well. Here is The Hollywood Reporter’s analysis:
Coming in third at the domestic box office over the weekend was Kevin Costner‘s pricey $100 million Western, Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter One. The film bit the dust with an estimated opening of $11 million (overseas numbers were not immediately available).
Horizon is without a doubt one of the biggest curiosity factors of the summer after Costner left behind a lucrative gig on Taylor Sheridan’s hit show Yellowstone and put up tens of millions of his own money to make his decades-long passion project a reality with four period Western movies.
The hope was that Horizon would strike a chord among older males in America’s heartland. A B- CinemaScore and meh reviews certainly didn’t help its cause.
Warners agreed to distribute and market the movie for a fee in the U.S. Costner — who has tirelessly promoted the movie — invested $38 million of his own money, while two mystery investors also ponied up equity. The rest of the budget came from selling off foreign rights with the help of sales outfit K5 International, which premiered the film at the Cannes Film Festival. (Horizon opens in numerous markets this weekend).
Horizon: An American Saga: Chapter Two opens in short order, on Aug. 16, in one of the more unusual distribution schemes in Hollywood history. Costner also put up the marketing money for Horizon.
The good news for us is that Ella Hunt has a topless scene in Part 1.
Sample:
I took my dad to it as a Father’s Day gift. As the first of four movies it’s not that good. There’s no singular protagonist, so this movie is just introducing the multiple Points of View characters and the beginning of their story arcs. The last 3 to 5 minutes is basically a trailer for at least the next chapter.
Maybe after the other 3 “chapters” of Costner’s epic is finished they’ll be judged better as a whole. It’s stocked full of character actors. There is that.
According to some articles the 100 million dollar budget is for both of the 1st two films so that at least makes it easier to get their money back.