Why Kevin Costner sued a Chinese movie that was never made for fraud
Kevin Costner has made plenty of good films in his time, with Bull Durham, JFK, and The Untouchables springing immediately to mind.
He’s also made plenty he might rather take his name off, such as The Postman, The Bodyguard, and Waterworld. That kind of variation in quality is not unusual over a long career, but it’s hard to fault him for being upset when a company used his name to promote a movie he hadn’t even appeared in.
It was around 2016 that the issues began for Costner, who had signed a deal with Kylin Pictures to act as a producer on a Chinese movie called Shanghai Sojourners, together with a $3million fee to do so. It told the story of a local woman who falls in love with a Jewish man during World War II and tries to help him escape the Nazis, but when Kylin decided to use Costner’s involvement to promote the film at the Shanghai Film Festival, it did not go down well.
That’s because a decision had already been made to fire Costner from the project, without paying him the fee, leading to Costner and his production company launching a lawsuit claiming a breach of contract and fraud, plus a loss of earnings, given that Costner had already rewritten more than 100 pages of the script.
Kylin had received some investments from backers on the basis of the actor’s involvement, and all the actors and the director were in place, with artwork ready to go, but the movie would never be released. In the end, more than a year later, Costner and Kylin came to an undisclosed settlement to avoid a long, drawn-out court process.
It wouldn’t be the end of Costner’s issue with lawsuits, however. The actor and director is currently facing several legal disputes that have sprung up from his epic series of western movies, Horizon: An American saga, including a primary lawsuit from a stunt performer on the second movie who claimed she was forced to perform a violent rape scene without an intimacy coordinator present.
Costner’s company is also facing a $350k bill for unpaid costume rental fees, plus there are disputed payments over deals to distribute the films, which are something of a passion project for Costner, who has had to dip into his own pocket in order to get them made despite attracting stars of the calibre of Sam Worthington, Sienna Miller and Luke Wilson.
Each of the movies so far has had a running time of three hours, and despite poor reviews, Costner intends to make a third and a fourth film in the series, which he is also directing and producing, having written the screenplays.
While production on the last two movies is currently delayed, Costner is busy with other projects like a thriller called Headhunters about a group of surfers going up against a land-guarding ancient island tribe, and a comedy-drama opposite Jake Gyllenhaal called Honeymoon with Harry, which has the intriguing premise of a man whose fiancée dies at their wedding deciding to go on honeymoon with her father. OK then.
