Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon’ Film Is a Flop — and He’s ‘Taking the News Pretty Hard’

Kevin Costner took a huge gamble investing $38 million of his own money into Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, and it did not pay off.

On July 10, New Line Cinema announced that the second installment of his pricey western epic won’t be hitting theaters in August as planned. The first chapter of the four-part franchise reportedly cost $100 million to make but earned only an estimated $11 million domestically on its opening weekend after receiving dismal reviews from critics.

The BBC’s Nicholas Barber called Kevin’s passion project a “three-hour slog … full of stultifying slow dialogue scenes,” while Entertainment Weekly’s Jordan Hoffman branded it “dull as dirt.”

The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis couldn’t help but notice that “no one seems to know how to spit tobacco, and to judge from the women’s perfect updos and tidy eyebrows, everyone on this frontier has a stylist in tow.”

Though New Line insisted that their decision to delay the release of the second film was to allow audiences a chance to discover the first one, Kevin, 69, is worried that the sequel and its subsequent follow-ups might never end up seeing the light of day, says a source.

“He really believed in these movies, still does, and is taking the news pretty hard.”