The one thing Kevin Costner has always despised about Hollywood: “Holy hell breaks loose”
If there’s one thing that has always been true about Kevin Costner, it’s this: he rarely does things the easy way. Throughout his career, the hugely successful star has been known to exert a considerable influence over the creative decisions on his movies, and his uncompromising approach often led to him clashing with directors.
However, it can’t be denied that Costner has been a Hollywood icon for nearly four decades at this point, and in that time, he’s made more culturally significant films than most leading men could ever dream of. After all, this is the guy who rattled off The Untouchables, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, JFK, and The Bodyguard within a five-year period in the late ’80s/early ’90s.
In Costner’s career, the dizzying highs have tended to spring from his intense commitment to realising his movies his way, studio notes or dissenting voices be damned. Hell, he’ll gladly put his own money on the line to make sure his personal vision makes it to the screen. This tactic led him to several box office behemoths and Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director,’ so it’s understandable why he would put so much stock in his opinions.
However, this single-mindedness hasn’t always served him well. It infamously led to hugely expensive failures like Waterworld and The Postman, and yet Costner’s commitment to never taking the easy road will likely never go away. He proved that yet again with the release of Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 in 2024. Once again, Costner pushed all his chips in, sinking a reported $38 million of his own fortune into his passion project, a four-part western epic, and once again, he approached the project with an unwavering fidelity to his vision.
Having said that, while trying to pull Horizon together, Costner was brought kicking and screaming back to one of the things he despises most about Hollywood filmmaking. “God forbid they go test screen it,” he grumbled to Deadline while giving a dual interview with Francis Ford Coppola, another maverick who has always done things his own way. “Then, holy hell breaks loose.”
To Costner, the idea of attempting to scientifically break down what does and doesn’t work about a film is a fool’s errand. Assigning scores to something that is ostensibly a subjective opinion is flawed in and of itself, but for Costner, it’s more about movies being “emotional experiences, not intellectual ones.” He believes, “That’s when the movies are at their most vulnerable; when we start giving them scores” because these numerical values encourage studio executives to only go by numbers, such as opening weekend box office, when judging a film’s value.
Indeed, Costner’s hatred of bowing to the vagaries of test screen audiences goes back a long way. He famously refused to cut The Postman down from a three-hour runtime, even after two test screenings that were described as “disastrous,” and he also fought tooth and nail to keep Waterworld at 171 minutes, but lost the battle when it was cut to 135 minutes for the theatrical release.
Fittingly, though, when it came time to bring Horizon to the screen, Costner refused to listen to any outside opinions yet again, and Chapter 1 clocked in at 181 minutes. Upon its release, it fared poorly at the box office, which left the future of the saga up in the air, but wouldn’t you know it, Costner still chose to back himself.
“I know, absolutely, that because of testing, studio executives live or die depending on what happens Friday night,” the star mused. “But movies can have a life long after that. I believe in the life of the movie more than I believe in the opening weekend, so every decision I make has to do with that.”
