How Disney accidentally ruined Kevin Costner’s career for the second time: “I’m stubborn”
It’s become clear that the biggest threat Kevin Costner will ever face in his career is Kevin Costner. While he should be applauded for refusing to play Hollywood politics, it hasn’t exactly been beneficial.
In his defence, it worked spectacularly well the first time he bet on himself, which may have been where the problems started. Costner was so confident in Dances with Wolves that he funnelled millions of his own dollars into the production, and his confidence was hardly misplaced.
It became the highest-grossing western of all time and netted him a pair of Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, which is as good as it got for him. He spent even more of his personal wealth on Waterworld, which wasn’t the wisest idea, but it was a damn sight smarter than doing it with The Postman.
The apocalyptic epic swept the board at the Razzies and was so negatively received that it exiled Costner from the mainstream for almost two decades. However, he still couldn’t help himself from putting his hand back into his pocket after stumping up the cash to fund the 2008 political dramedy Swing Vote and the 2014 drama Black or White.
It wasn’t until Yellowstone that Costner re-entered the realm of relevance, winning a Golden Globe for his performance as patriarch John Dutton in the smash hit TV series. Once again, though, his passion got the better of him, and he decided to leave the show to focus on his ambitious four-part epic, Horizon.
The first instalment flopped, the second remains stuck in cinematic purgatory without a release date, and he hasn’t gathered the money to finish the third or start the fourth. Disney could have stopped all of it from happening, but a squabble over money saw Costner walk away from major studio backing.
“Right after I made Open Range and it performed pretty well, I had a chance with Disney,” he told Deadline of the journey toward making Horizon a reality. “We had a $5 million difference. They had had a lot of money success with Open Range, but a $5 million difference kept them from making this movie.”
Explaining his reasons for walking away from the safety net provided by the ‘Mouse House’ and sitting on Horizon for the next two decades, Costner didn’t fuck around: “I’m stubborn.” Had Disney agreed to an extra $5 million for the budget, then it would have been a single, albeit very long, picture.
Costner has confirmed that he spent around $38 million on the first two chapters in the Horizon saga and that it would be at least $100 million if he ever gets the chance to finish the quartet. That’s a ludicrous amount for someone to dig out of their bank account, especially when he turned his nose up at having Disney pay for the whole thing over a fraction of the cost.
