Is Kevin Costner in His Flop Era?
As I flipped through the Sunday paper two weeks ago, a headline caught my eye: Kevin Costner Is Pursuing His Western Dream. Will Audiences Follow? Below it, the following deck:
To make “Horizon,” he put his own money on the line and left “Yellowstone,” the series that revived his career — all with little Hollywood support.
I felt a familiar giddy twinge. Stars! They’re Just Like Us! They leave “perfect on paper” jobs to take big creative risks, too!
Costner mortgaged one of his properties and invested “well above $50 million” of his own money to write, direct, and act in a four-part series of movies about Civil War-era America. Each movie is estimated to cost $100 million to produce.
Although he received a standing ovation at the Cannes debut, many critics felt it was a “chore to sit through.” The first movie failed by box office standards, as Brooke Barnes reports in “Costner’s Costly ‘Horizon’ Bites Box Office Dust,” and Warner Brothers scuttled the second film’s release as a result.
Granted, K-Cost has an estimated net worth of $400 million, and he was making $1 million per episode starring in Yellowstone before placing this big bet.
But his desire to go all-in on this decades-long project created irreconcilable scheduling conflicts and a rift with Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, who I can only imagine must be peeved to halt one of the most successful TV shows of the decade so that his star can create films with a similar premise. Costner’s (now ex-) wife of eighteen years also initiated divorce proceedings around the same time.
Still, Costner presses on, replete with a People magazine cover story in June. Like so many of us, although he seeks commercial and critical success, there is something bigger driving him:
Now, as he finally brings to the screen the sweeping story he’s kicked around for more than 30 years, Costner has no regrets. “The gamble is ignoring my heart and ignoring it whispering to me,” he says.
As we learned from our four-part Delulu is the Solulu series, even all the money, fame, and beauty in the world cannot guarantee success. I think that’s why we enjoy watching celebrities take creative risks, and I hate to say it, why we sometimes take pleasure when they fail. It levels the playing field somehow. And the stakes are even higher for stars as millions of people watch to see if they will succeed or fail, analyzing and Monday-morning-quarterbacking every move.
Instead of pure schadenfreude, though, I propose a new phrase: mitgefühlversagenfreude. It’s my made-up word (with the help of ChatGPT) for empathy-failure-joy, or feeling empathy and even a little relief when hearing about someone else’s failure; not wishing any ill-will upon them, but grateful to know you’re not alone.
“So will I claw my money back?” Costner asks while speaking with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, when asked how his family feels about putting his pile at risk:
“I have my reasons. I’m going to control this movie for the rest of its life, so I’m not dependent.
Will I make a lot of money? The hope is that I will. Anybody listening? Yeah, I hope so. I hope I make a boatload. But I’m not going to not do what I have a chance to do. I don’t think I would feel very good about myself.”
At the start of a podcast conversation with former Navy Seal Andy Stumpf, he alludes to failure, knowing the real possibility his films won’t succeed financially:1
“For as phony movies can be, we also learn about a certain kind of heroism when we see it and we think to ourself, well, shit, I want to be that guy. I don’t want to be that guy. And when you see heroism sometimes and the guy’s defeated and the other guy wins, you say, I still want to be that guy because of what he stood for.”
According to media insider The Ankler, he still needs financing for the third and fourth installments. He does seem to be getting more reticent, something I viscerally relate to after selling a condo to go all-in on Free Time.
As he tells Stumpf (emphasis mine):
“I’m pretty far out in the limb on this one, about as far as I can be, so I don’t feel like I want to do that anymore. But I’m also not going to spit on my life, or I’m not going to look at the pile I have that’s just sitting there, right, when that could help my vision. I don’t want that to own me either.”
Will he keep going with the second two films? Will he secure financing or put more of his own money in? Will they have a chance of being released in theaters again? We’ll have to wait and see.
In the meantime, he can live with himself knowing he tried, flop or not.2
❤️
From the Change Agents episode, I also love what he shared with Andy about deciding to pursue acting during his senior year of college:
“But getting in touch with myself, really in touch with myself, putting my first foot on the yellow brick road of what my life was going to be, what I think is not an iceberg, the tip of an iceberg that anybody else can see. But if you ask me what I’m most proud of is that I got control of my own life, that I would decide my fate.”
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Fascinating. So many people put such emphasis on financial success. But for those who have already “succeeded” in a financial, the growth edge is seeing a creative vision realized. No matter what the cost.
And some of us want to do this before having millions in the bank… 😹 our souls have no idea what to do with all those arbitrary zeros on a balance sheet. 💰
After watching JLo's "WTAF just happened here?" downfall and now Kevin Costner's, I'm particularly intrigued by stars who don't seem to have people around them who are willing to push back and say "Um, this seems like a bad idea." All I've heard about Part 1 of this movie series is that it desperately needed an editor to cut back an hour or so from the run-time.
I'm super late to this post, but this week we're seeing it with Blake Lively and "It Ends With Us" - the one person who seems to be sharing that the movie is not some feel-good girly romcom (Justin Baldoni) has been shunned and pushed aside by the cast and in press, but the reactions from the public are so supportive of his statements and work while side-eyeing the hell out of Ms. Lively.
Somewhere in-between, I've been FASCINATED watching Jennifer Esposito's passion project and subsequent clawing-her-way through battle to get her brilliant movie "Fresh Kills" the eyes and press it deserves. Because folks with profiles like JLo, Costner, and Lively are allowed to flop through their success - while many are struggling to get half the recognition for just as much work.
It is so very unslay. 😉