Kevin Costner may be leaving “Yellowstone” but he’s not done with cowboys and guns just yet. The acclaimed filmmaker is returning to the director’s chair for the first time in a long time with “Horizon: An American Saga.” This is an ambitious, two-part blockbuster Western that represents a passion project for Costner. With an A-list cast and Warner Bros. backing the two-parter as a major summer release, this is a very unique situation — and a costly one at that. Both films, which release on June 28 and August 16, respectively, carry a $100 million budget. That means the whole thing costs a whopping $200 million. Granted, the studio is getting two movies for that but the success of the second wholly relies on the presumed success of the first. That’s the real tricky thing here.
Costner was at the helm of “Dances With Wolves” ($424 million worldwide), which still ranks as one of the biggest Westerns ever made. But it’s been a long time since a movie in this genre made money anywhere near that big, with Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” ($425 million worldwide) serving as the most recent example, and that was more than a decade ago at this point. Are general audiences going to turn up in big enough numbers to justify a Western of this scale in 2024? That is a big, expensive question mark. And if the first movie doesn’t perform very well, WB will be left holding the bag for the second as well. If the first movie does well, the second movie could, in theory, do even better as audiences will have had the chance to catch up with the first installment before the sequel arrives.
In both cases, the films face stiff competition as part one is opening directly against “A Quiet Place: Day One,” while part two is opening against Fede Alvarez’s new “Alien” movie. If this works, Warner Bros. is going to look brilliant. If it doesn’t, the losses could be substantial.