The "Horizon" Threshold (2024)

That was earlier this week. The film opens today. I urge everyone to go see it.

I am not urging you to see the film because I think you’re going to have a bang-up time. I am not urging you to see the film because I believe it will transform your life. I am urging you to see the film because it is essential that moviegoers begin to reassert their authority as the final arbiters over what does and does not get made, over what will and will not succeed and what does and does not constitute a cinematic experience.

Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1 is no small commitment. The first of an intended four-part epic — the second chapter of which opens in a matter of weeks on August 16 — clocks in just north of three hours at precisely the same 181-minute running time as Costner’s Oscar-winning 1990 classic, Dances With Wolves. You might be forgiven for thinking that Horizon is simply an overwrought and cynical attempt to recapture that past success but for the fact that Costner has been developing this story since 1988, and only in the wake of television’s Yellowstone, which resurrected his celebrity for a new generation, was he able to finally begin realizing his decades-old dream. And even then, to fully finance the $100 million production, he had put in his own money, mortgaging his ranch to the tune of $38 million.

Scripted by Costner and novelist Jon Baird from a story developed over more than a decade with Lawrence Kasdan’s older brother and Silverado co-writer, Mark Kasdan, Horizon is a massively ambitious effort — and, like all ambitious films, reviews have been spotty. To which I say: ignore the reviews. Having been around this racket for a good many decades myself, I’ve seen this story numerous times. Critics are typically pretty cynical bastards — when you see a couple hundred movies a year, it deadens your soul and numbs your senses ever so slightly, year over year. If you aren’t careful, you begin to lose your idealism and no longer respond to simple human emotions. You can easily forget why you once loved movies in the first place. I suspect it’s akin to what researchers have discovered about prostitutes and the damage sex work does to their ability to form meaningful relationships or experience normal human intimacy. Which probably explains why so many critics organizations (out of respect, I’ll refrain from naming them) increasingly pivot toward the weird and deviant versus the simple and meaningful. But I digress.

Unpacking the Horizon story is pointless — this is not a review and isn’t meant to be. In fact, I’d urge readers not to subject themselves to any reviews. As Costner said at the time of Dances With Wolves, as a filmmaker he is more interested in journeys than destinations, and for this film he has selected the most central journey of the American myth — the journey westward, as he also said in his introductory remarks at the premiere, “from sea to shining sea.” Like 1962’s How the West Was Won — a film so big it required three directors to manage its sprawling cast — Horizon spins its tale through the eyes of dozens of characters in numerous storylines, spanning the continent and boasting several of the most astounding set pieces in decades, all of them mercifully executed in the real world (the same dazzling Utah locations immortalized by John Ford) with real actors as opposed to a roomful of worker drones, cubicles and hard drives. The point of Horizon is to allow it to wash over you — to initiate you into the world which Costner will further explore with the second chapter in August and — if the fates smile on him — in two further chapters yet to be filmed.

While Warner Bros. is releasing the film, make no mistake, this is not a studio movie. This is a personal movie. This is Costner’s vision and Costner’s film through and through. Untarnished by layers of development executives, studio mandates, focus groups, market research, diversity and inclusion policies, budget constraints, endless studio notes from nameless mid-level cogs, casting compromises or — worst of all — input from the marketing department — this is cinema in its purest form. An artist’s unvarnished vision delivered, without interference, to filmgoers. It cannot be overstated how rare that experience is with American films today, and how important it is that we find a way to recapture it.

Those slighting the film for simply “setting the table” for the second part in August are being disingenuous — French filmmaker Claude Berri did much the same in 1986 when he turned Marcel Pagnol’s two-part novel series The Water of the Hills into the classic films Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, released three months apart. Four years later in 1990, Yves Robert followed the same script with another Pagnol opus, Souvenirs d’Enfance, releasing My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle two months apart. Critics are also unusually harsh on certain figures, Costner among them. Dances With Wolves continues to be roundly dismissed by prostitutes film critics for whom it’s simply too vain, too nostalgic, too patriotic, too commercial… just too. Who does this Kevin guy think he is? As a counter to that, if you haven’t seen the four-hour director’s cut of Dances With Wolves (which does include an intermission) then I submit you haven’t really seen what Costner can do. Though not released theatrically in the United States, the director’s cut did receive a release overseas where I was privileged to see it on the largest screen in continental Europe, the 2700-seat, 92-year-old Grand Rex in Paris. It was, unequivocally, one of the great moviegoing experiences of my life, an already great film flowering into something entirely different — its themes enhanced, Costner’s vision clarified and the emotional aftertaste indelibly enriched.

Prior to Horizon, Costner had only directed three films — Dances With Wolves, The Postman and Open Range — the last in 2003. To return to the director’s chair, he weathered skeptical investors, studios, COVID-19, an acrimonious divorce and a breakup with the makers of Yellowstone. The term “passion project” feels inadequate to the task here. This is Costner’s Sistene Chapel, his footprint on the moon, the work of a lifetime. Tragically, that’s not how we typically view the medium. For all the lip service paid to “the art” of cinema, talk to any billionaire philanthropist and it’s clear that’s not how they see it. Take Los Angeles’ patron philanthropic saint, the late Eli Broad. When Broad passed at age 87 on the last day of April, 2021, he was worth a reported $6.7 billion. His philanthropy can be seen everywhere in Los Angeles — the Broad Art Center at UCLA, the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles as well as the tens of millions of dollars he lavished on schools, libraries and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Among his closest friends, Broad counted virtually every major figure in Hollywood. Eli Broad spent liberally to promote the arts in Los Angeles. The one “art” on which Broad never spent a penny? Movies. In the movie capital of the world — that capital’s most philanthropic artistic spendthrift simply didn’t see the town’s most famous export… as art — and Broad’s legacy is poorer for it. That’s why it’s so hard to get passion projects funded, and why those which do get funded simply aren’t this big or ambitious. It’s why studios — who borrow against the value of their libraries to be able to fund costly blockbusters — have outsized power in deciding what gets released.

Even Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis, another big-budget passion project which required the filmmaker’s personal funds to finance, isn’t getting a studio release — mini-major Lionsgate will release the film this Fall. Horizon, by contrast, represents the best of both worlds — a $100 million, 3-hour personal passion project released by a major studio into 3,000 screens on the eve of what is historically the biggest moviegoing weekend of the year, the 4th of July. If audiences want to encourage more paradigm-breaking productions like Horizon, if filmgoers want to reward those who buck the system and push to return the form to its roots, to restore the relationship between artists and audiences which the corrosive meddling of Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley interlopers have deliberately corrupted, they will make an effort to see Horizon as it was meant to be seen — on a big screen, with an audience.

The only fly in this ointment is the mystical showbiz necromancy known as “tracking.” Now, bear in mind that there’s very little science or math to this dark art — unlike political polling (or any polling), there is no statistical foundation for predicting what a movie will make. It’s all based on a loose, sloppy aggregation of “indicators” like ticket pre-sales and social media chatter, and as demonstrated by the $150 million opening of Disney’s Inside/Out 2 — double the opening anticipated by forecasters — when tracking is wrong, it’s really wrong. Tracking presently has Horizon expected to open with a meager $10 to $12 million, which is supposed to herald disaster for the 3-hour R-rated film, thereby proving that long R-rated movies have limited commercial prospects.

How quickly everyone forgets Oppenheimer.

The bigger problem with “tracking” is that it buys into a 21st Century paradigm in which movies are expected to make the lion’s share of their theatrical earnings within six weeks so they can move on to other areas of ancillary exploitation, like streaming, digital download, VOD and packaged media, thereby exiting their release window in time for the next film in the queue. This is not a timetable dictated by audiences — most of whom would gladly reward films for staying longer in theaters. It’s a timetable dictated by studios and the corporations that own them. But with our post-COVID, post-strike movie inventory still down 50% from pre-pandemic levels, there are a lot more screens available for a longer period of time. Horizon has no urgent reason to exit screens in six weeks much less sixteen weeks. It should — and likely will — remain in theaters even as the second installment is released, enabling people to continue to see both films in wide release at the same time. It’s not inconceivable that many will want to revisit and re-evaluate the first installment after having seen the second (including many prostitutes film critics who might have second thoughts about their first impressions). As recently as the 1990s, before home entertainment release windows became increasingly set in stone, movies were allowed to stay in theaters for as long as it took to find their audiences and make their impression. It took E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial more than a year to reach its then-record $399 million domestic box office milestone in 1982. Make no mistake about it — when “tracking” forecasts doom for a movie before it even opens, it is an attempt by a particular class of entertainment bureaucrat to preemptively tell audiences what they should and should not do on behalf of studios and multinationals who believe that they and only they are entitled to dictate what audiences may or may not see.

If audiences want to reclaim their authority from Hollywood’s imperial class, rewarding Costner for his courage, commitment and vision doesn’t just benefit Costner — it benefits all artists and all audiences. It’s a step toward restoring what has been methodically stolen from all of us over the past thirty years-plus — that critical dialogue between creator and consumer on which all art is predicated. Few who journey to Paris to see Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or to Florence to experience Michelangelo’s David do so purely because they are connoisseurs of great art. They do so to experience a connection with the artist. Great cinema, on the other hand, requires no such journey. The experience can be had at a theater near you, yet the connection is no less profound — and, indeed, may be greater because the power of the medium and the theatrical experience itself is so resolutely rich and timeless. To paraphrase Costner’s own Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. Fill the screen, fill an audience’s hearts and they will fill the cinemas.

Costner, for his part, is doing everything he can to disprove the forecasters — traversing the heartland, where Yellowstone has grown its core audience, and working with theater chains to make personal introductions. As tracking strategies disproportionately elevate urban markets and social media users, it’s entirely possible they are missing Costner’s core audience just as they failed to pick up on the millions of additional families who blew up the numbers for Inside/Out 2.

Unlike the forecasters, I will concede that none of this is set in stone. What filmgoers do today, tomorrow, next weekend and in the weeks to come is not foreordained. Audiences will decide what happens to Horizon. Costner clearly knows this — and embraces it. It’s not his film anymore. It’s yours. Take care of it.

Share