What's happening with Kevin Costner's Horizon movies?

Kevin Costner can never be faulted for his ambition. He has been a part of some of the biggest movies ever made, whether successful or unsuccessful, and has worked tirelessly to get his passion projects into multiplexes. That was certainly his plan for Horizon: An American Saga — a four-part epic Western tale spanning more than a decade of history with a cast of dozens of central characters.

The first Horizon movie arrived in cinemas in the summer of 2024 and, well, nobody went to see it. The three-hour epic earned just $38m (£30m) at the global box office, scuppering plans for chapter two to be theatrically released just two months later. Since then, the future of the series has been in jeopardy.

Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 now sits in a weird state of limbo. The completed film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2024 but, as of yet, there's no sign of it arriving for the public to see either in cinemas or on streaming platforms.

Naturally, this awkward state of Schrödinger's cowboy movie will have a knock-on effect on the planned third and fourth films in the franchise. Some of the filming for Chapter 3 took place concurrently with the second movie, though there's still more to do and, understandably, Costner is finding things a lot less free and easy than they were when he started on the first movie.

At an event organised by Deadline in November 2024, Costner nodded towards this increased difficulty, but said he's determined to keep the franchise train on the tracks. “I’m hoping, I’m dreaming, I’m meeting all the billionaires that we all hear about — they’re all hiding in the shadows,” he said.

Read more: Kevin Costner admits $100m ‘Horizon’ epic didn’t have ‘overwhelming success’ (BANG Showbiz, 2 min read)

Costner added: “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to make [Chapter 3] and then I’m going to make the fourth one. And if you want to say ’the end’ at that point, then that’s the end.” He went on to describe the project as his "own private UFO", adding: "I’ve seen it, and I will never forget it, and I chase it as long as I can … I will figure out a way to bring you 3 and 4, because you’ve gone to 1 and you’re gonna go to 2, and we’re all gonna go west together.”

As determined as Costner is, this is by no means a sure thing. The truth of the movie business is that it's a business, after all, and films have to make money. Horizon didn't do that earlier this year and there's no suggestion that the box office is going to pick up with the sequels. Only 51% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave the first film a positive review, while theatrical audiences gave it a pretty middling grade of B- via Cinemascore.

Read more: Kevin Costner 'never imagined' Horizon movies to be released so close together (Cover Media, 2 min read)

Against a backdrop of critical apathy, meagre audience, and lukewarm response, it's tough to imagine how Costner can achieve his grand vision for Horizon. The answer, as much as the multiplex evangelist Costner might not like it, could be on the small screen.

As several other long-established auteurs have discovered this year — just look at Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis — it's a hard sell to get audiences into the cinema for an epic movie without a big-name franchise identity behind it. The same is not true at all when it comes to television and streaming.

Costner himself is proof of this. Audiences have watched hour upon hour of his cowboy-hatted antics as patriarch John Dutton in Taylor Sheridan's hugely popular TV series Yellowstone. When they don't have to leave the comfort of their sofas, people are more than willing to indulge Costner wandering around quite slowly while talking about horses and ranches.

Read more: ‘Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1’ Review: Sprawling Yet Thinly Spread, the First Part of Kevin Costner’s Western Epic Feels Like the Set-Up for a TV Miniseries (Variety, 7 min read)

But that didn't mean he wanted to make Horizon on TV. In June 2024, he said: "I believe in the big screen. I believe in that experience. I also believe in what will come to your television. You know, I'm not one of those guys that has a director's cut. The f***ing movie I make is the director's cut."

Costner's determination is admirable, even though it might make Horizon untenable. The filmmaker has already tossed a lot of his own money into the mix, but it's not possible to make movies this size with the individual wealth of one Hollywood star. If Horizon is to reach its conclusion, he'll need some help — either from audiences discovering his film or from someone with even deeper pockets than his own.

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 is available on video-on-demand in the UK.