Kevin Costner’s new project Hori­zon will now be four inter­con­nect­ed movies

You’ve got to respect Kevin Cost­ner, a guy who won’t let any­thing shrink his Napoleon­ic ambi­tions. Whether star­ring in Water­world (at the time, the most expen­sive flop ever made) or scor­ing a box-office cat­a­stro­phe of his own with The Post­man, he’s always picked him­self up and moved on to the next feat of majes­tic hubris, a pat­tern that seems to be repeat­ing itself with the news of his next film.

Or should we say films, plur­al; Vari­ety ran a report this morn­ing that Hori­zon, Costner’s first direc­to­r­i­al project since 2003’s Open Range, will be split into four inter­con­nect­ed movies. Ten­ta­tive­ly sched­uled to be released at reg­u­lar three-month inter­vals, the four parts will run an esti­mat­ed two hours and forty-five min­utes each, to be shot lat­er this year over the course of two hun­dred and twen­ty days — ​“a moun­tain of time,” as Cost­ner puts it.

The rugged folksi­ness of his metaphor befits the sub­ject mat­ter at hand, Hori­zon being Costner’s return to his wheel­house of the hard-bit­ten peri­od West­ern. Set through fif­teen years in the set­tle­ment of the Amer­i­can fron­tier, the tetral­o­gy saga will cov­er a mosa­ic of lives cov­er­ing pio­neers, their long-suf­fer­ing spous­es, the indige­nous res­i­dents being dis­placed from their homes, law­men, politi­cians, and just about every­one else touched by the rapid reshap­ing of the nation.

Cast­ing is cur­rent­ly under­way on a whop­ping one hun­dred and sev­en­ty speak­ing parts, in keep­ing with the titan­ic scale on every oth­er aspect of this mam­moth under­tak­ing. One might assume that the for­mat of Hori­zon may remand it to a stream­ing release on pre­sid­ing stu­dio Warn­er Bros.’ plat­form HBO Max, but Costner’s quote leaves the pos­si­bil­i­ty for any­thing: ​“What [the stu­dio does] with it will real­ly be up to them, because things change real­ly quick­ly in how peo­ple want to see things and what they want to do.”

In any case, props to Cost­ner for lever­ag­ing his bump in per­son­al stock due to the mega-pop­u­lar­i­ty of his long-run­ning stream­ing series Yel­low­stone, and for using it to com­man­deer what must be a stag­ger­ing sum of Warn­er mon­ey for the most auda­cious entry in his dis­tin­guished yet impro­lif­ic career. Ready your­self for a thor­ough dis­man­tling, tra­di­tions of Amer­i­can self-mythology!