Kevin Costner Leaving Yellowstone To Finally Make His Dream Series?
Kevin Costner may be leaving Yellowstone to work on his long-gestating western project, Horizon.
Rumor has it that Kevin Costner may be leaving his smash hit neo-Western series Yellowstone soon. And even if he isn’t, the award-winning actor is only contractually obligated to show up for filming for 65 days out of every year. According to Collider, either way, that means Kevin Costner has plenty of time to nurture his dream to create one of the widest-spanning series in television history, Horizon.
Kevin Costner has long been planning the logistics for Horizon, an epic Western set on the American Frontier that spans 15 years and features the stories of 170 characters (yes, I said 170 – that was not a typo). But don’t worry: Kevin Costner knows that’s a lot of characters and content to fit into one movie! So, he’s breaking Horizon up into four separate movies.
Each will have a runtime of around three hours. These individual films will then be repackaged and re-edited for television, where they will become a western series consisting of “more digestible” episodes of around 42 minutes each.
Kevin Costner’s passion for a film like Horizon makes a lot of sense: he has long been drawn to the Western genre. In addition to starring in numerous cowboy movies and television series, he was inspired to be an actor after watching How the West Was Won at a very young age. So, it would seem that the veteran actor is a perfect fit for this project… even if some critics are already a bit dubious about it.
Ever since the project was announced in January 2022, people have been worried about two things. The first is that they don’t want this epic series to be a repeat of Heaven’s Gate, a nearly four-hour film by Michael Cimino that is described by Collider as “a $44 million celebration of hubris that ended up as one of the biggest critical and financial disasters in cinema.” In other words, they don’t want Kevin Costner to be overwhelmed by the pure vastness of Horizon and end up creating an 11-hour-long slog that no one wants to watch.
The second worry on the list is the format. Kevin Costner obviously has the clout and the maverick nature to do whatever he wants with Horizon, but no one releases films as a series of four still huge, three-hour chunks and then repackages them later as a television show. It’s just not done.
But breaking the rules is what cowboys do, isn’t it? And if Kevin Costner doesn’t have a problem with creating a film (or is it a series? What are we calling this?) in this manner, who are we to judge? We will just have to give him free rein to figure things out as he goes.
Plus, those worried about the grandeur of Kevin Costner’s Horizon turning it into a behemoth that will never see the light of day or the darkness of a cinema should know that the first part of the film has already finished production. It has a cast and everything! The film will feature Sam Worthington, Jamie Campbell Bower, Sienna Miller, Luke Wilson, Danny Huston, and Jenna Malone, among many, many others.
The real problem will be getting all those actors back together to shoot the other films around their other projects, as coordinating schedules has got to be tough with so many people involved. Still, though, it looks like Kevin Costner’s Horizon dreams are becoming a reality, so we’re sure he’s got it covered.
