This isn’t Kevin Costner’s first rodeo. Before Field of Dreams came out in 1989, a Vanity Fair profile of the film’s star predicted it would “probably disappear quickly” because it was “curiously literary and undramatic.”
You can try telling that to the millions of people who’ve since made pilgrimages to the Dyersville, Iowa, cornfield where Ray Kinsella was advised that “if you build it, he will come,” but they might think you’re talking crazy.
“It was so dismissive, that Field of Dreams would fade immediately,” Costner told E! News in an exclusive interview. “And we’re still doing celebrations of it. Men and women, sons and daughters, it’s stood the time of decades, now generations-and that’s how I try to make movies. That’s what I see for
Horizon.”
Costner’s known for taking big swings, some of which ended up out of the park, while some were line drives straight into the glove.
And his long-gestating Horizon: An American Saga-Costner’s planned four-part story of Civil War-era westward migration that he left Yellowstone to finally start making, took its share of skeptical industry lumps long before Chapter 1 hit theaters in June.
Much to the actor’s… lack of surprise.
“I’ve faced life with people being dismissive of me,” Costner said. “But they can’t be dismissive of Horizon, because now it’s out of their hands. And they might point to the finish line-well, this is what it did at the box office-but I know that this movie is going to play for the next 50 years.”
Because not unlike with Field of Dreams, “There’s a moment in time where you want to see this movie,” he said. “To understand that this is what their went through. It’s not just a western, it’s a history of migration and what they had to do to survive. And I’m really proud of it.”
Subsequently, the 69-year-old remains undeterred by the decision to take Horizon: An American Saga-Chapter 2 off the summer release schedule instead of putting it in theaters Aug. 16, just seven weeks after the first film opened. In a July 10 statement explaining the move, New Line Cinema and Costner’s Territory Pictures said they switched course to “give audiences a greater opportunity to discover the first installment.”