©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
We need to talk about Kevin.
When seen earlier this month in the return of Paramount’s megahit, “Yellowstone,” Kevin Costner’s character was slumped on the floor dead, allegedly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Fans of the show, angry that Costner bailed on the second half of the final season, felt its creator and executive producer, Taylor Sheridan, was trolling his former pal by portraying Costner’s character, the ruggedly handsome and stoic Montana patriarch John Dutton, as suicidal.
It was the latest kick in the teeth to Costner, 69, who has suffered a brutal 2024 which saw him finalize a divorce from second wife Christine Baumgartner, leave the TV hit he helped create and see his self-financed, four-part $100m passion project, “Horizon” flop both critically and at the box office.
Many would view him as being on the ropes. But those close to Costner know he’s been in similar situations before and is not fazed by the apparent downturn in his fortunes, which remain significant — according to Baumgartner’s divorce filing, he’s worth some $400m.
“Kevin’s awesome,” a longtime friend of Costner who was out to dinner with him last week, told The Post.
“I’ve known him for years. I just saw him and he was in great spirits. He didn’t talk at all about how his projects are doing. He makes so much money through his investment decisions.
“He’s not sitting around and worrying about how his shows or movies are performing at the box office. He just cares that their quality is good.”
Costner’s also been back in the gossip pages since his 2023 split, first being linked to the country singer Jewel, 50 – whom he insists is just a friend – this summer and then for getting “flirty” with Sharon Stone at the Governors Awards ceremony in Los Angeles last week.
He’s certainly doing well for the son of a ditch digger turned electric line serviceman for Southern California Edison.
Costner’s big break in the movie industry was thwarted when his scenes were famously cut from 1983’s “The Big Chill,” which could have made him a star. He finally broke through in 1988 with “Bull Durham,” the story of a minor league baseball player who tells co-star and love interest Susan Sarandon he believes in “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.”
Those with long Hollywood memories compare Costner’s current situation with the mid 90s.
His triumph-against-long-odds western, “Dances with Wolves” in 1990 put him on the map, winning seven Oscars total and revitalizing the near-dormant Western genre.
The film told the story of Union Army Lt. John J. Dunbar, played by Costner, who travels to the frontier looking for a military post and finds a group of Lakota. Much of the dialogue is spoken in Lakota with English subtitles.
He continued to win over audiences in “The Bodyguard” and “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” but then came a bomb of epic proportions, “Waterworld,” in 1995. It was the then-most expensive movie ever made, costing $175m and becoming a Hollywood punch line for the rest of the decade.
That also coincided with a tough time personally, as Costner split from his wife and mother of his first three children, Cindy Silva, in 1994.
He spent the next ten years making a series of largely forgettable movies and had another son through a brief relationship with Bridget Rooney in 1996. Costner met Baumgartner in 2004 and went on to have another three children, who are all now teens.
Although Costner had memorable leading man roles in “JFK,” “Field of Dreams” and “The Untouchables,” he’s always come back to the western – starring in films like “Silverado,” “Wyatt Earp,” “Open Range” and “Let Him Go” as well as TV fare like “The Hatfields and McCoys” and “Yellowstone.”
“I’m haunted by the interactions of people when there’s no law; when something’s wide open, how do you behave?” Costner told GQ this year. “And it’s a really interesting way to measure yourself in the dark. Who do I think I am in this? Now, a lot of people go, ‘Well, of course I’m the f—ing hero.’ And you want to say, ‘Really? You sure about that?”
Unlike most Hollywood stars, Costner also has real cowboy credentials, having bought a160-acre Aspen estate in 2000, which is now worth some $80m. Earlier this year he even put the property – which features its own baseball field and room for 27 people – on the market to rent, at $36,000 per night.
The property, named Dunbar Ranch after his “Dances with Wolves” character, looks distinctly similar to the one inhabited by John Dutton, Costner’s beloved “Yellowstone” character, who first debuted in 2018 and introduced him to a whole new generation of fans.
His fallout with Sheridan and refusal to appear in the final episodes of “Yellowstone” were a shock. And somehow, despite audiences loving John Dutton, they haven’t followed him over to the big screen as the response to “Horizon” has been lukewarm at best.
“With the fading of Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner is the last Western man standing — the last major movie star-filmmaker who’s still interested in making traditional Westerns on a big scale,” Ken Tucker, a longtime NPR pop music critic and former film critic for New York Magazine told The Post.
“His problem is the audience for Westerns is getting as old as he is, and aging baby boomers can’t give him the box office results he needs.
“He fit right into the Yellowstone universe because Taylor Sheridan is totally in love with the kind of stoic tough-guy-with-mature-emotions that Costner conveys so well.”
The “Horizon” saga, which he first began developing in 1988, is a sweeping saga broken into four separate movies involving a 15-year span, before and after the Civil War, about the settlement of the American west. Sienna Miller, Abbey Lee, Sam Worthington and Jena Malone round out a star-studded cast. Costner is the star of the project, and also directed, produced and co-wrote it.
Costner told GQ that he sank $38 million of his own money into “Horizon”– mortgaging his lush $60m Santa Barbara home to fund the film. (Luckily that’s the lesser of Costner’s two estates in the area, behind his $145m compound which has been his main home since the 80s).
Costner admitted he had an obsession with “Horizon,” at one point comparing his insistence at taking on the huge project to literary character Captain Ahab self-destructively pursuing the great white whale in “Moby Dick”.
“The white whale obsessed him so much that he would take everybody down with them,” he told GQ, but adding, however, “I take nobody down with me. I take the risk myself.”
Having suffered failure before Costner is reflective but unafraid, adding: “I’ve taken big bites out of life, life’s taken big ones out of me, right?”
The first two “Horizon” movies, called “chapters” were released in June and August, respectively, but after a weak box office performance it’s unclear when, if ever, the final two will appear.
Costner told The Hollywood Reporter in May he’d shot a few days of “Chapter 3” and had enough money to shoot maybe a week more.
“They’re going to happen regardless, but they’re not already funded,” Costner admitted to GQ.
Costner’s rep, Arnold Robinson, did not respond to detailed questions from The Post about Costner’s career and the fate of the last two chapters of “Horizon.”
Veteran entertainment journalist and TV producer Brian Balthazar said Costner is far savvier than people may give him credit for, given his years of experience in Hollywood.
“Costner has seen quite a few commercial successes in his long term career, and it’s afforded him the chance, now more than ever, to think of his professional decisions as artistic endeavors without as much concern about the net financial gain,” Balthazar told The Post.
“Whether his fans like it or not, he has demonstrated a commitment to creating art that resonates on a deeper level, often prioritizing storytelling and authenticity over commercial considerations.”
At times it sounds as if betting on himself – as he’s doing again in “Horizon,” – exhilarates him as much as scares him.
“It doesn’t matter how much water’s hitting me in the face, I can’t let go of the rope,” he told GQ.
But, he conceded, “I’m as far out on a limb right now as I’ve ever been.”