“It’s Devastating”: Kevin Costner Defends His New ‘Yellowstone’ Flop Movie Series

Kevin Costner is under increasing pressure to defend his new replacement for Yellowstone, and he’s starting to make some pretty weird public statements about it.

Notoriously, Kevin Costner announced his departure from Yellowstone, the enormously popular Paramount Western drama series/ranch-set soap opera that vaulted him back to the upper echelons of Hollywood. It can be debated whether the Taylor Sheridan show got more of a boost from the presence of one of the great living Western actors as lead character John Dutton or if Costner himself has been completely revitalized because of it, but there is no denying the success of seeing the actor wearing a cowboy hat and squinting at the horizon.

However, now that the main series is reaching a sudden conclusion with the upcoming Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2, there is another big question: can Kevin Costner survive without Yellowstone?

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The actor/director seems to think so. Prior to his departure from the show, Costner had announced his absurdly ambitious Horizon film series, which would take on the history of westward expansion in the United States post-Civil War. That in itself would be a big task, but it was also announced that Horizon would be composed of four massive, three-hour (ish) films and that the first two films would be released within short weeks of each other.

That didn’t pan out exactly like Costner could have hoped for his big post-Yellowstone next act. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 flopped hard in theaters, causing New Line Cinema (the distributor of the films, which were financed in large part by Costner himself) to pull the second film from its original August 16 release date. It currently has no scheduled premiere, effectively canceling its release.

In the meantime, the Venice Film Festival has taken it upon itself to screen Horizon 2. That means a film that was intended for a worldwide release has been relegated to a single showing, which is not great news. Despite that, Costner has been trying to play it up as a positive (per Deadline), recently claiming that it was always his plan to premiere in Venice and that the studio just got in the way. He said:

“I always wanted to come out with the [Horizon] movies about five, six months apart, and that was going to allow me to come to Venice… When it was six weeks, I wasn’t going to get to come here… But what happened is a miracle in life… My plan was always to bring it to Venice, and suddenly it has happened.”

Somewhat bizarrely, Costner compared the historical setting of his movies to Disney, saying, “I just love the journey of America, the promise of what America was… It’s not a land in Disneyland, it’s a place where it was difficult, and it happened in inches. And I just wanted desperately to tell that story.”

Related: ‘Yellowstone’ Starring Kevin Costner Content Removed

By Costner’s own admittance, he doesn’t know how he’s going to get the third Horizon movie made, which is a pretty big step down from starring as the lead of the world’s most popular show. He continued, “Chapter 3 is devastating. It’s devastating because you begin to know all these people and life keeps coming at them, and you will see that…I don’t know how I’m gonna make 3 right now, but I’m gonna make it.”

Meanwhile, Paramount and Taylor Sheridan are churning out Yellowstone spinoffs by the cartload and are rumored to be considering extending the main show past Season 5 and the departure of John Dutton by retooling it to center on Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser).

Do you think Taylor Sheridan can make Yellowstone Season 6? Tell us your thoughts below!