Kevin Costner Is Helping Resurrect A Dead Genre Across Multiple Streaming Services
The success of Yellowstone and Kevin Costner is causing multiple competing streaming services to develop Western shows.
The success of Kevin Costner’s Paramount series Yellowstone appears to have generated a new wave of Western-themed projects, a genre that has been declared dead more times than Dracula. According to a report in The Hollywood Reporter, many of the major streaming services are now developing Western shows, but it remains to be seen whether any will be successful without the anchor of a star associated with the genre like Kevin Costner. It also remains to be seen whether even Yellowstone can survive without him.
Currently, Netflix is looking to piggyback off the popularity of Kevin Costner and Yellowstone with two different series. The Abandons is being developed by Sons of Anarchy’s Kurt Sutter, which makes it a bit difficult to see as anything but a naked attempt to lock down its own Taylor Sheridan, who starred in the same series. The Abandons will be set in 1850s Oregon, which also seems like an attempt to imitate the recently renewed Yellowstone 1883, with its theme of westward expansion in America.
Netflix is also developing American Primeval, a series about how the Western half of America developed (as we see it in popular culture, anyway), starring Taylor Kitsch. Both shows would likely not exist without the mammoth success of Kevin Costner and Yellowstone, nor would Amazon Studios’ rumored Western series from True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto.
It will have to remain to be seen if any of these shows experience any of the success of Yellowstone or if it is simply a case of studios attempting to ride a wave of popularity for as long as it lasts. In fairness, the same has to be said of Paramount+’s attempts to replicate the success of Yellowstone with shows like Tulsa King, Land Man, and whatever shows about men in hats staring stoically at the horizon it is currently working on developing.
A key difference is this: none of those shows star Kevin Costner, the working actor perhaps most associated with Westerns. Only Clint Eastwood can rival Costner for being synonymous with Westerns in the public mind; even though the Yellowstone star has made movies as wildly different as the post-apocalyptic science fiction debacle Waterworld and Draft Day, a movie about a football coach going through a lot of stuff. However, the image of Kevin Costner in a 10-gallon hat, astride a horse is apparently just what the public wants.
This is not the first time that Kevin Costner has helped kick-start a Western revival. One of his first starring movies, 1985’s Silverado was an early example of interest in the genre coalescing around the actor. He won seven Academy Awards for the arguably defining 1990s Western, Dances with Wolves, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Since then, Kevin Costner has gone back to the Western well about every decade or so, with varying degrees of success (Yellowstone) and failure (Wyatt Earp). But regardless of the individual success of any of his Western projects, it seems just the idea of Kevin Costner is enough to make studios think the genre is ready to be resurrected.
