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There’s a lot to admire about an actor who’s willing to bet everything on themselves and what they believe in as an artist and creative, even if it doesn’t always go according to plan. Kevin Costner has done it more than once and flirted with disaster more often than not, but it hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm.
One of Hollywood’s biggest stars from the late-1980s to the mid-1990s, Costner was on top of the world. Seeking to take his career to the next level, he invested millions of dollars into his feature-length directorial debut and reaped the rewards.
Dances with Wolves became the highest-grossing western ever released and won seven Academy Awards from 12 nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ for Costner. It was a risky gambit that paid off and then some, only for the actor to discover that lightning didn’t stand a chance of striking twice.
Seeing as it had worked so well the first time around, Costner was within his rights to produce, play the lead role, and invest some of his personal wealth in his second effort behind the camera. However, The Postman was savaged so viciously by critics and bombed so hard at the box office, in addition to sweeping the board by winning all five Razzies it was shortlisted for, that his time on the A-list was instantly over.
It would be another two years before he appeared onscreen again, and when he did, it was clear his reputation as a bankable leading man and drawing card was in tatters. For Love of the Game, Thirteen Days, 3000 Miles to Graceland, and Dragonfly all failed to recoup their budgets from cinemas, leaving Costner on the outside of the industry’s upper echelons looking in. Still, he’ll always defend The Postman.
“Well, I always thought it was a really good movie,” he told Huffington Post. “I always thought I probably started it wrong. I should have said something like, ‘Once upon a time’. Because it was just like a modern-day fairy tale, it wraps itself up with a storybook ending with the statue. So, I like the movie.”
He’s allowed to like it, even if he was firmly in the minority on that front, but what’s impossible to argue is that it had a noticeably detrimental effect on his career. Although Costner never really went away, it’s telling that after The Postman, commercial success, critical acclaim, and even noteworthy major parts were increasingly thin on the ground.
Winning a Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe for his work on the Hatfields & McCoys miniseries was as good as it got for the next two decades after The Postman, only for Costner to become the embodiment of the definition of insanity when he quit the role that launched his comeback in favour of doing exactly the same thing again.
The Yellowstone patriarch scooped another Golden Globe for his turn as John Dutton, only to exit the hit series in favour of funnelling millions into another passion project he wrote, directed, produced, and played the protagonist. The first chapter of Horizon flopped, and the second remains in limbo, hinting that it’s a lesson Costner is never going to learn.
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