Everything We Know About ‘Horizon,’ Kevin Costner's Upcoming 4-Part Western Epic

In February 2023, the hit show "Yellowstone" abruptly announced it would end with its fifth season. Actor Kevin Costner, the show's lead since 2018, left the show amid speculation as to why he would end his role in what was the No. 1 show on television for most of its life.

"Horizon: An American Saga" is the reason why.

Even as the fifth season of "Yellowstone" was still in production, cameras were already rolling for the first part in what will be a four-part series of feature-length films. "Horizon" covers a span of 15 years of American history on the frontier during the late 19th century, beginning with the end of the Civil War and rolling into western expansion.

The series stars Costner, who was not only willing to leave "Yellowstone" behind to make the film but also mortgaged 10 acres of his waterfront property in Santa Barbara, California, to fund it. The trailer for Part 1 of his Western epic dropped on YouTube on Feb. 26, 2024.

"I did it without a thought," Costner told Deadline in a May 2023 interview. "It has thrown my accountant into a f*cking conniption fit. But it's my life, and I believe in the idea and the story."

Just judging from the trailer, "Horizon" has everything anyone could expect from an epic Western. We are immediately greeted by sweeping vistas of deserts and pasture, stagecoaches, Native tribes raiding settlers, gunfights, saloons and outlaws.

"You and I are standing guard over one of the last great open spaces," one U.S. Army officer says to another in the trailer. "There's no army of this Earth that's gonna stop those wagons coming, little as they're wanted."

But we can probably expect more than just another "cowboys and Indians" story or Spaghetti Western from Costner. Aside from "Yellowstone," the actor has had a longstanding interest in telling stories from that rough-and-tumble era of American history. In 1991, he won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director for his film "Dances with Wolves," another epic Western drama. Costner also hosts "Yellowstone One-Fifty," a four-part documentary series about the national park on Fox Nation, and his other historical and Western projects include "Open Range," "Wyatt Earp" and "Hatfields & McCoys."

"We have a lot of Westerns that aren't good, too, because they get simplified, [but] this isn't Disneyland. These are real lives," Costner told reporters during a discussion of the trailer. "People just making their way, women just trying to keep their families clean and fed ... I'm drawn to that. I'm always gonna get to my gunfight, but I'm drawn to the little things that people had to endure."

Filming for the first installment of "Horizon" ran from August to November 2022, and the second began in May 2023. Costner originally intended for a new movie to release every three months, but production for the third and fourth installments have yet to begin due to delays caused by the 2023 Hollywood strikes. The total runtime of the entire saga will be around 11 hours, divided among the four movies.

"They're all different films that all connect, so you're watching a saga of these storylines that are happening," he told Variety in June 2022.

The cast of the new series includes Giovanni Ribisi ("Saving Private Ryan"), Sienna Miller ("American Sniper"), Sam Worthington ("Avatar"), Tatanka Means ("Killers of the Flower Moon"), Ella Hunt, Will Patton, Michael Angarano ("Oppenheimer"), Luke Wilson ("Idiocracy"), Michael Rooker ("Guardians of the Galaxy"), Jena Malone ("Rebel Moon: Part One"), Glynn Turman ("The Wire") and Thomas Haden Church ("Sideways").

"Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1" hits theaters on June 28, 2024. The next release, "Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 2," will be in theaters two months later, on Aug. 16, 2024.

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