In November 2023, there was an unusual meeting of minds. The coffee producers Green Mountain Coffee Roasters - part of the Keurig Dr Pepper empire, which also includes the likes of Snapple and Dr Pepper - announced a collaboration with the actor, director and (in their description) “renowned Academy Award winner” Kevin Costner, to produce the “Horizon Blend by Kevin Costner”.
This blend is said to be “a layered and complex flavour profile grounded in [Costner’s] personal coffee taste”, and possesses “a smooth yet robust flavour profile, alive with earthy, smoky flavours”. Costner himself was quoted as saying: “Alongside the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters team, we embarked on a journey of exploration, experimenting with various concepts. They were able to help guide me through the process where my opinion was valued and incorporated. It was the best outcome I could have imagined.”
Actors selling their names and faces to beverage companies is, of course, nothing new; witness George Clooney, happily swapping his reputation for the Nespresso millions. Yet there is more to Costner’s embrace of Green Mountain than mere love of lucre - or of coffee. Instead, the name of the blend, Horizon, functions as a marketing tool for what might be the 69-year-old filmmaker’s most ambitious project yet, a two-part western epic which is being released this summer in what is being called a major event - and the riskiest film of 2024.
Details on its plot are scarce, beyond the fact that it’s set before and after the American Civil War, depicts the expansion of the American West and that Costner will be starring (naturally) alongside an ensemble cast that includes Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington and Luke Wilson. A short teaser released towards the end of 2023 gave few clues. But the film is clearly a true passion project for its director-star, which began as a relatively low-budget picture in 1988 and has spent the next three and a half decades slowly coming to fruition.
Unusually, its two halves are coming out a few weeks apart, in June and August, rather than the year or so that they would be expected to take. If the first part of the grandiosely named Horizon: An American Saga is a hit, then the second part will almost certainly succeed and the two further films that Costner has been promising - or threatening - will come to pass too. And if it’s a flop, then at least the failure will be reasonably self-contained rather than dragging on into another year.
At the moment, it is impossible to know whether the pictures will be successful or not. Costner has not been an A-list star at the box office for decades. Although he has appeared in high-profile supporting roles in financially successful pictures such as Hidden Figures and Molly’s Game recently, he has not starred in a major film since 1997′s The Postman, a post-apocalyptic fantasy drama that opened to dreadful reviews and was an egregious commercial flop.
Since then, his highest-profile success was his 2003 western Open Range, in which he co-starred with Robert Duvall and Annette Bening, and which, perhaps coincidentally, represented his last film as director. Yet Hollywood was a very different place two decades ago, long before the advent of superhero movies and streaming services. Back then, adult-themed pictures could make an impressive US$68 million ($111m) at the box office, off a budget of a third of that. Now, they might struggle to be seen by anyone.
Yet there is a crucial factor in Costner’s favour, too. He may not be a big-screen draw any more, but he has been appearing in the hit western TV series Yellowstone since 2018 as the patriarch John Dutton III, for which he won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in 2023. The show, created and written by showrunner par excellence Taylor Sheridan, is set in the present day, but otherwise shares many of the same themes as Horizon, revolving around a struggle for power and status in Montana and focusing on Costner’s charismatic and driven cattle rancher.
The character declares in the opening episode: “I am the opposite of progress. I am the wall that it bashes against, and I will not be the one who breaks.” This conservative ethos permeates the show - even if Sheridan is said to be irritated by the designation - and has led to its becoming a huge hit across the American red states, engendering a great deal of goodwill towards Costner, all of which he will need if Horizon is to be the success that he wishes it to be.
His new directorial project was filmed between August 2022 and the summer of 2023 and last year especially proved to be something of an annus horribilis for Costner. Although it started well with the Golden Globes, the actor was unable to collect it because of flooding on the Californian motorways and later attracted ridicule because of an excessively laid-back acceptance speech that he gave when he received the award. Rather than the black tie that most of his fellow actors wore to the ceremony, Costner wore what appeared to be leisurewear and delivered his grateful remarks from bed.
It did not help that he was already embroiled in a furious row with Sheridan over creative control and that he had announced his intention of leaving Yellowstone after the fifth series; he will make his final appearance in the show this November, shortly after the release of the second part of Horizon.
Kevin Costner with Kelly Reilly in Yellowstone.
Yellowstone has undoubtedly revived Costner’s career, and it is doubtful that he would have obtained any of the US$200 million-plus funding that the two parts of Horizon have required without it. Still, there is a certain degree of opacity as to how, exactly, he has come across the money. In a lengthy and (apparently) candid interview with Francis Ford Coppola last year, for the trade title Deadline, Costner admitted that he has invested a great deal of his own cash. “I’ve mortgaged 10 acres on the water in Santa Barbara where I was going to build my last house,” he said. “But I did it without a thought. It has thrown my accountant into a f***ing conniption. But it’s my life, and I believe in the idea and the story.”
It is thought that the film has also been made with money from Middle Eastern investors - a surprising choice, given its all-American subject matter - and Costner has recently been seen in Saudi Arabia. But there are few, if any, details forthcoming as to who has stumped up tens of millions of dollars for his passion project.
After the success of Open Range, he nearly made the picture with Disney, but the budget offered was US$5m short of what he required. Yet Costner refused to let the idea go. As he said to Deadline: “At the end of the day, I’m a storyteller and I went ahead and put my own money into it. I’m not a very good businessman, so, scratch your head, if you will. I don’t know why, but I have not let go of this one. I’ve pushed it into the middle of the table three times in my career and didn’t blink. This is my fourth.” (It is now being distributed by Warner Bros Pictures in the United States and K5 internationally.)
It has not helped Costner that he was also engaged in an expensive divorce from his wife of nearly two decades, Christine Baumgartner, which was finalised last year; although it is unclear as to what led to the breakdown of the marriage, his spokesperson came out with the passive-aggressive statement: “It is with great sadness that circumstances beyond his control have transpired which have resulted in Mr Costner having to participate in a dissolution of marriage action.” He has since found himself in the tabloids once again, thanks to his relationship with musician Jewel, and amidst the sniping and rumour that has surrounded the ending of Yellowstone, he knows that he has a vast amount to prove.
2024, then, is something of a make-or-break year for Costner. There has been another unfortunate appearance at the Golden Globes, during which he was mocked for seeming preoccupied and distant during a scripted appearance with Barbie star America Ferrera, in which the pair presented Best Female Actor in a Musical or Comedy Series; Costner was called upon to recite part of Ferrera’s monologue from Barbie, which he did with remarkable awkwardness, before stating: “It just reminds me that when we take our time, when we manage to get it right, when film is working at its very best, it can be about moments you never, ever forget.” As, of course, it can be when it’s working at its worst, too.
Hollywood has already written off the Horizon films as a pair of flops. It is not hard to see why. If something as star-studded and critically acclaimed as Killers of the Flower Moon can fail to reach the US$200m mark at the global box office, then Costner’s endeavour would seem to be doomed from the outset. Westerns are often a tricky sell commercially, especially internationally, and although Costner’s great triumph Dances with Wolves grossed a staggering US$424m upon release in 1990, the chances of anything even coming close to that level of success seem remote.
The film that was the turning point in Costner’s commercial fortunes was Laurence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp in 1994; it was compared unfavourably to the more shoot-’em-up Tombstone and flopped. Since then, the genre has encompassed hits (Django Unchained, 3:10 To Yuma, True Grit) and flops (the ill-fated Cormac McCarthy tale All The Pretty Horses, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). To speak in sweeping generalisations, all-action pictures tend to do well at the box office, whereas more serious and meditative films struggle.
It is hard to say which camp the Horizon films will be in, although Costner’s record as a filmmaker tends to the commercial. Nonetheless, he still carries the embarrassing taint of flops such as The Postman and Waterworld with him, as well as a reputation for control freakery that has seen him notoriously fall out with many of his former colleagues, most infamously Kevin Reynolds, who was fired from both Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Waterworld.
Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves.
Nonetheless, Costner remains one of Hollywood’s undeniable old-school star actors, and there is perhaps nobody today more closely associated with the western genre, thanks both to his films and Yellowstone. His considerable personal financial investment in the Horizon films speaks volumes about his commitment to the material, and, if they are successful, the next two pictures will presumably be greenlit.
And if not? Well, then it’s time for him to wake up and smell the coffee. All the same, few would begrudge Costner this final throw of the dice. Like Coppola - whose own passion project Megalopolis could go either way - this represents personal conviction over bean-counting safety and should therefore be commended. If the films are any good, that is an added bonus.
Still, it’s hard not to sympathise with his closing remarks to Deadline last year, when he said: “But I’ll tell you what. I’m never gonna do this again. I’m never putting my f***ing money in another movie after these four.”
Only time will tell if he recoups his investment or not.
