Kevin Costner Suggests Taylor Sheridan May Have ‘Borrowed’ from ‘Horizon: An American Saga’
Talking to Kevin Costner after the Cannes premiere of “Horizon: An American Saga,” IndieWire’s Anne Thompson asked the filmmaker if he thought he could improve on Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone.” Costner starred as John Dutton for five seasons; he is unmentioned in the press release for the sixth, which just began production.
“No, of course not,” he said.
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However, Costner noted, it could be the other way around: During the second season of “Yellowstone” in 2019, he said, Sheridan was looking for writers. He and Baird sent him the “Horizon” script. Thompson noted that both “1883” and “Horizon” share a wagon train story.
“So I don’t know if there’s any duplications there,” Costner said. “Whether he borrowed something, only he’d have to admit to.” (Reps for Sheridan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Vague accusations of “borrowing” aren’t new to “Yellowstone.” It’s a popular topic on fan sites, which have called out Sheridan for plotlines that echo everything from Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” to Janet Dailey’s “The Calder Saga” and Costner’s own “Dances With Wolves.”
Conversely, critics have begun looking to “Horizon” for ways in which it might ape “Yellowstone” — including, as many reviewers noted, a structure that might suggest a series more than a movie. The two productions also share a few actors, including Danny Huston.
Another possibility: There are so many Westerns and most of the stories take place in the 50 years between the establishment of the Oregon Trail and driving the last spike of the Great Northern Railway. As a genre, it’s the definition of endurance: Those gritty cowboys with their sweeping landscapes and brutal survivalism have been captured, over and over, in fiction, biographies, movies, and TV; if AI creates new formats, it probably will show up there, too.
Westerns are so ubiquitous that their familiarity has become part of its storytelling. After repeated exposure to cowboy stories, we all approach them from similar baselines; creators face the challenge of finding fresh ways to convey plots that verge on the proverbial.
In any case, Costner said any would-be sharing of wagon trains is not the original source of his well-reported antagonism with Sheridan. He said it all comes down to schedules.
“What’s been said, it’s just so off base,” Costner told Thompson. “I was only going to do one episode or once a season. And then I helped them and I did five seasons and made a contract literally to do the last three — 5, 6, and 7. They just quit hitting the mark on their scripts.
“And then we basically had one year that was completely wiped off the map [and] they didn’t tell anybody,” he continued. “Fourteen months later, I could never have that happen to me again. So I kept ‘Yellowstone’ in the first position, but they had to stick with their contract. And when they were done, then I would do ‘Horizon,’ not vice versa. It’s as simple as that.”
Will he go back to “Yellowstone”? “I know they’ll probably do that without me,” he said. “I’m open to coming back. But I basically have to see what the scripts are about. But now ‘Horizon’ has my first position.”
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