Max is the last Horizon for Kevin Costner’s American Saga
The box office flop canters to the streamer August 23
Photo: Richard Foreman/Warner Bros. Entertainment
It’s poetic, really; Kevin Costner staged a multi-million dollar, self-funded epic meant specifically to engender a huge theatrical event, only for it to get unceremoniously dumped on Max two months later. Maybe the arc of history really does bend toward streaming.
Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1 will trot on over to Max on August 23, after making the box office equivalent of a bad harvest during its brief theatrical run. The film, which follows the lives of several characters during and after the Civil War, brought in only $11 million in its opening weekend, according to Variety, which makes up just a teeny fraction of its approximately $100 million budget. It’s currently sitting at a measly $34 million international haul (via Box Office Mojo).
Maybe it was the unwieldy title, which will now somehow have to fit in one of those tiny boxes on the platform’s homepage, or it could have been the fact that Costner, by his own admission, only makes movies for 50% of the population. Either way, both are bad signs for the success of Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 2, the second installment in Costner’s planned four-part, 11-hour film. After the failure of Chapter 1, Chapter 2 was bumped from its original release date of today (August 16) because hardly anyone would have gone to see it, er, to “give audiences a greater opportunity to discover the first installment of Horizon over the coming weeks, including on PVOD and Max,” as a New Line Cinema spokesperson recently told Variety. That does make sense. Movies aren’t TV and shouldn’t function like it. There’s a reason, in Costner’s own words, that a major back-to-back release like this has “never been done,” and probably won’t be attempted again.
That’s not to say that Chapter 2 (or Chapter(s) 3 and 4, which have yet to be filmed) will never land in theaters. Audiences just need some time to re-acclimate to Costner the way many of them probably discovered him in the first place; on their couch, in front of a much smaller screen.