How one movie set Kevin Costner’s career back by decades
The first time Kevin Costner‘s name was listed as a director, things couldn’t have gone much better after the A-list superstar revealed to the world that he was just as talented and capable of carrying a movie from behind the camera as he was drawing in the crowds from in front of it.
As far as debuts go, Dances with Wolves becoming the highest-grossing film in the history of Orion Pictures, the top-earning western ever made, and the winner of seven Academy Awards from 12 nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ is a hell of a way to kick off a directorial career.
On the other hand, things couldn’t have gone much worse the second time around. Having clearly failed to learn a single lesson from Waterworld – the infamous, exorbitantly expensive post-apocalyptic bust he was heavily rumoured to have taken over from Kevin Reynolds and ghost directed himself – Costner doubled down on his obsession with the end of the world.
As the leading man, producer, and director of The Postman, the buck started and stopped with him alone. Waterworld did at least eventually manage to turn a profit through television syndication and home video sales, but his sophomore effort as a filmmaker most definitely did not. Losing a fortune for Warner Bros. after recouping just a quarter of its $80million budget from cinemas, more ignominy was yet to come.
The Postman was nominated for five Golden Raspberry Awards in the ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, ‘Worst Actor’, ‘Worst Screenplay’, and ‘Worst Original Song’ categories, and won every single one of them. Costner vastly overestimated how interested audiences would be seeing him as a nomadic deliverer of letters who travelled the American wasteland while becoming a folk hero along the way, although matters weren’t helped by the fact it was terrible.
In a disastrous movie retrospectively, Costner handed over the script for Air Force One – which had been written specifically for him – over to Harrison Ford in favour of The Postman, with the latter star’s high-profile blockbuster of 1997 earning 16 times more in ticket sales than the latter’s and going down as a genuine action classic.
At the turn of the decade, Costner was on a remarkable hot streak of success and had proven himself a big-name director to boot. After The Postman, though, it would be six years before he wielded the megaphone on another feature and two decades until his star ended up shining as brightly as it had during the peak of his career. Just like that, he was no longer viewed as a bankable name or a viable director of costly productions, a perception that took a long time to shift.
There was the occasional bright spot along the way – such as his return to directing with Open Range and Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy-winning performance in miniseries Hatfields & McCoys – but they were anomalies amidst a sea of forgettable dreck that left Costner on the outside looking in when it came to mainstream success.
He segued into comedy in Rumor Has It, dabbled in supernatural horror with Dragonfly, got into bed with Disney on The Guardian, played a serial killer in Mr. Brooks, lent support in superhero story Man of Steel, dipped his toes into espionage with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, tried to mimic Liam Neeson’s Taken success in 3 Days to Kill, and returned to his safe haven of sports dramas in Draft Day, but Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot was only one that hit big, and it had nothing to do with Costner’s involvement.
It wasn’t until the role of patriarch John Dutton in Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone came along that Costner felt like a big deal again, something he’s sought to capitalise on by co-writing, directing, producing, and headlining two-part epic Horizon: An American Saga. Hopefully, it goes more along the lines of Dancing with Wolves than The Postman because the notorious disaster ended up sending him spiralling into a professional wilderness that it took 20 years to come back from.
