The Kevin Costner flop Tom Hanks and Ron Howard wisely avoided
While it’s admirable that Kevin Costner has always shown a willingness to bet on himself, it hasn’t always worked out in the best interests of his career.
It did pay off handsomely the first time, though, with the first-time filmmaker sinking millions of his own dollars into Dances with Wolves, which turned out to be a shrewd investment when it became the highest-grossing western ever made and won seven Academy Awards from 12 nominations.
With ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Picture’ trophies in his back pocket, Costner was a bigger star than ever, only to fly too close to the sun too many times in quick succession. The first major setback was Waterworld, which eventually turned a profit in the years to come, but the most expensive picture ever made at the time definitely wasn’t worth the investment.
Having recently finished working on an expensive post-apocalyptic epic that opened him up to levels of scorn and mockery he’d never faced since first cracking the A-list in the 1980s, for whatever reason, Costner decided that the next logical step would be to begin working on another expensive post-apocalyptic epic.
What limped into cinemas on the other side was The Postman, a disaster so colossal it single-handedly set his career back by decades. A box office catastrophe, Costner’s first directorial effort since Dances with Wolves swept the board at the Golden Raspberry Awards, winning all five trophies it was shortlisted for, including ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Actor’.
In another retrospective misstep, he turned down the lead role in Air Force One to make it, which had been written specifically for him to play and ended up becoming the top-earning non-Star Wars or Indiana Jones film of Harrison Ford’s entire career. Costner took on heavy rewrites of the original script for The Postman, which was so bad even the author of the source novel couldn’t get behind it.
Reflecting on the adaptation’s tortured development process, David Brin shared on his website how “the resulting script – despite at least half a dozen rewrites – had become notorious in Hollywood.” Not only that, but it dissuaded some notable power players from taking it under consideration as their next project.
Brin shared how the draft making the rounds was so terrible it was capable of “discouraging even such figures as Tom Hanks and Ron Howard, who had been attracted by the overall concept.” Costner was headstrong enough to think he could turn the chicken shit of The Postman into chicken salad, but it would be an understatement to say that he failed on all counts.
Howard directing Hanks in The Postman would have been interesting, to say the least, looking at how Costner’s version turned out, but it would also be safe to suggest they both dodged a bullet.
