Kevin Costner is an actor-producer-director extraordinary, whose talent has only gotten better with age. The Oscar winner has worked on many projects over the years, but that doesn’t mean he has lost his way. It’s more like he found his way to the exact place he needs to be. After giving his time and energy to Paramount and Yellowstone for five seasons, he left the show before its last few episodes, citing a conflict in schedule.
Kevin Costner wanted to do his own thing and had been postponing it because of the Taylor Sheridan-created show for a long time. But he found that the same courtesy wasn’t being returned to him, and Costner decided it was time to leave Yellowstone behind and do what he wanted to for decades. And that’s how he ended up making not one, but two Westerns out of a four-part series he had been planning for decades.
Kevin Costner’s Mettle Shined With Horizon
Westerns have always been Kevin Costner‘s favored genre to work in. While he has had many movies he has worked on, this particular genre of movies has always fascinated him. Which is why, even when he decided to go and direct his own movie only a decade into his Hollywood journey, he chose a Western story to go with.
And now that he is taking yet another leap of faith, it is yet another Western epic he has in mind. Horizon has been on his mind since the late 80s, even before he made his directorial debut with Dances with Wolves in 1990. And while he has faced many troubles in the past few years, especially with the whole divorce saga and then his Yellowstone departure, Costner is not one to let his dreams go to waste. In a conversation with GQ last month, Costner said:
I’m right now looking at myself in the dark and going, Are you going to fucking stand up and finish? Get up. I’m the audience. Get up, Kevin. Get the fuck up and deal with this and find the joy every day of seeing your kids play while you’re here—and then work your ass off to get this thing finished.
So it doesn’t matter that he hasn’t been able to secure funding for the next two parts of the four-part Western. Or that he had to pool his own resources to get the first two made. If he believes in the story, he is going to stick to it. And that is exactly what Kevin Costner has done with Horizon.
Kevin Costner’s Love For Westerns That Won Him His First Oscar
Kevin Costner made his Hollywood debut in the year 1981, and nine years later, he was sitting on the director’s chair, making his debut with a Western – Dances with Wolves. The 1990 movie too, faced a lot of problems initially, but Costner did not back down. People told him he had very little experience in the field and should wait to make his directorial debut, but he did not listen to them.
And a good thing too, that he avoided the naysayers. Dances with Wolves went on to win 7 out of 12 Oscars that year. It also won Costner his two Oscars in his career so far – one for Best Picture and the other for Best Director. He was also nominated in the Best Actor category but lost it to Jeremy Irons, who won it for his role of Claus von Bülow in the 1990 film, Reversal of Fortune.
After much deliberations, Costner has found a distributing partner in Warner Bros., who has taken on the responsibility of working with him on the first two movies. Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 is all set to be released on June 28, 2024. And Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 2 will be released on August 16, 2024. Dances with Wolves is available for streaming on Fubo TV.