The one lesson Kevin Costner will never learn: “I couldn’t get anybody to see what I saw in it”
Kevin Costner has always been one of Hollywood’s biggest gamblers. Over the course of more than four decades in the moviemaking business, he has consistently bet on himself when others warned him not to. For example, when he first ascended to leading man status, his advisors pleaded with him not to make a baseball movie because they rarely hit at the box office. In response, he made two in a row: Bull Durham and Field of Dreams. Costner has seemingly never learned the lesson of caution from all his risk-taking, though, because he is still throwing the dice to this day – and it may have finally caught up with him.
In 2014, a defiant Costner strode into his den and told his wife something that can’t have surprised her, given his history of backing projects no one else would take on. He had fallen in love with a script named Black and White, a racially charged drama about a White grandfather raising his African-American granddaughter. When the girl’s grandmother insists she lives with her drug-addicted father instead, the grandfather finds himself in a custody battle.
Naturally, though, given Costner plies his trade in the notoriously risk-averse Hollywood, no studio wanted to pony up the cash for the movie. At CinemaCon, a frustrated Costner said, “I think its a powerful movie, I think it’s very commercial. I think it smells like everything that studios want, which is money – and that’s not bad. I don’t think artistic and financial things are mutually exclusive.” Unfortunately, his reasoning fell on deaf ears, and he admitted, “I couldn’t get anybody to see what I saw in it.”
So, when Costner told his wife, “I think I’m gonna pay for this movie,” she gave the same response she’d likely provided on the many other occasions Costner decided to use his own money to bankroll a movie. “If you think that’s what you should do, then that’s what you should do,” she mused – and that’s what he did.
Costner reportedly forked over $9million for Black and White—the film’s entire budget—and agreed to star in it for director Mike Binder, whom he’d previously worked with on The Upside of Anger. The movie made $21million at the box office, so Costner’s gamble paid off, just as it did the first time he broke Hollywood’s golden rule: “Never, ever invest your own money in a movie.”
The Yellowstone star’s history of throwing his own cash into the mix to get a project over the line goes back to Dances With Wolves. That epic western took five years to make and was dubbed ‘Kevin’s Gate,’ a sly reference to Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which bankrupted an entire studio. Costner contributed $3million to the film’s $19million budget and was called a fool – but walked away with seven Oscar wins, $424million at the box office, and a reported $50 million payday for himself.
Next, when the $100million-budgeted Waterworld was the victim of a hurricane that sunk its primary set in Hawaii, Costner supposedly paid $22million to rebuild it. The movie became a notorious box office disaster. However, Costner has always maintained it made its money back “multiple times” thanks to ancillary VHS/DVD sales and TV deals. It’s not clear, though, whether he ever saw his $22million again. Costner also put his funds into 1997’s The Postman, although the exact number isn’t known, and that historic flop likely didn’t return his investment.
After Black and White, though, came Costner’s most significant gamble yet. Depending on which reports are to be believed – and which Costner soundbites are the whole truth and nothing but the truth – he either paid $38million or “well above $50million” to make his uber-ambitious four-part western Horizon: An American Saga. Sadly, the first part of that epic tanked at the box office in 2024, seemingly signalling that Costner should have quit while he was ahead.
However, Costner isn’t a man who shies away from doing what he believes in. If he’s passionate enough about something and feels it needs his money to be brought into the world, then no amount of lessons learned will stop him from doing that.
“I had the kind of success that I couldn’t even dream of,” he once told The Hollywood Reporter. “But I don’t want to let this pile of things I have — whether it’s money, whether it’s [possessions] — be so important to me that I can’t think about what I want to do…I thought to myself, ‘That’s going to control me if I let it.'”
