After the western genre was incredibly good to him, Kevin Costner says his next piece of work could stray away from it.
Obviously, Costner couldn’t have asked for a better blessing than Yellowstone. An argument could be made that the Taylor Sheridan series put some juice back into his career… that is until his John Dutton character was written out of Yellowstone with only a few episodes remaining in the flagship series.
That was mostly because he had prioritized his own passion project, Horizon: An American Saga, and *spoiler alert* that didn’t work out all that well.
Horizon: An American Saga was supposed to be a four-part, western-theatrical series… and it only made it through it’s first part. “Chapter Two” of Horizon: An American Saga was pulled from its original August 2024 theatrical release after the first installment’s poor performance.
Why? Well, to be frank, it’s because the saga’s first chapter performed abysmally at the box office. Horizon’s maiden voyage at the movies only made $11 million in its opening weekend. That obviously means the film fell short of expectations, considering that Costner had put forth $38 million of his own money for his passion project, and the first film’s budget came in around $100 million.
It was a little risky to plan – and basically go ahead and execute – a four-part movie series before giving audiences a chance to see if they like it. With the struggles of “Chapter One,” Costner and his movie crew opted to pull “Chapter Two” from the release calendar.
According to the reports, the 70-year-old actor and director sat down with Territory Pictures and their distribution partner, New Line Cinema, and ultimately made the decision to delay the second film. Now that we’re over a year since that happened, with no real further updates, it’s looking like Horizon: An American Saga might not ever finish out it’s four-part run.
Horizon’s box office disaster has apparently led to Costner having a change of heart about going full-western in the future. In a recent interview with Radio Times, the acting icon suggested that he’s still very much interested in creating new things, but they might not be like what he’s been busy with in the past decade or so:
“(I’m) willing to do anything where I feel like what I’m doing is for myself. It doesn’t have to be a Western, it could be something else. But when something is no longer interesting to me, or there’s some other reason that I need to move on, I’m willing to do that.”
For Costner, his motivation doesn’t seem to be based in making money, or crafting box office darlings that everyone flocks to the theater to see. The former Yellowstone actor just wants to leave a legacy, and it certainly seems like the next thing he does will be something that could stand the test of time:
“I think you can write a short story and it can live forever. You can write a novel and it can live forever. You can make a short movie and it can live forever. It’s about how you’re telling it. It’s about if other people are going to be able to relate to it and move to it. That’s why there are certain books that continue to live with us, that we pass on to our children.
I think the hope for me is that I can stay relevant; not only to myself, but to people who find my work. I can’t create work that I think is going to find them. I can only create work that when they do find it, it reflects what I was feeling and my sensibility. And hopefully they’re moved by it.”
Here’s to hoping that Costner figures his next big move out sooner rather than later. The TV and film world is a better place with him in it.
As far as we know, the next thing that the star has coming up is a role in an upcoming dramedy film titled Honeymoon with Harry. The two-time Oscar winner will star alongside Jake Gyllenhaal, and the story focuses on a man (played by Gyllenhaal) who loses his fiancée days before their wedding and decides to still go on the planned honeymoon with his would-have-been father-in-law (played by Costner).
Hey… that’s certainly not western.
