In the brave new world of movie and television economics, exactly what constitutes success or failure lives on either side of a set of goalposts that seem to move weekly. There are some clear wins and losses, and streamers (mostly) don’t even release audience data. But it is also true that one man’s failure can be another man’s triumph.

Which may turn out to be the story of Kevin Costner’s costly flop, Horizon: An American Saga. The first of a planned series of four films landed in cinemas with enormous fanfare in June but was met with a brutal reception of just $US36 million in box office takings, against a budget of $US100 million-plus marketing and exhibition costs.

Set in a 15-year-long period during the American Civil War, Horizon: An American Saga was conceived as a four-part story, each a motion picture and streaming original. But its failure in cinemas – and those numbers add up to a failure, make no mistake – means that streaming may yet be a second gasp of air that saves Horizon from drowning.

The franchise now shifts from cinemas to streaming, a second window that was always part of the deal, but now becomes much more important given the three still-unreleased films in the series are unlikely to get anything more than a film festival exhibition. Plans to release Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 in mid-August were immediately scuttled when its first chapter sank.

And yet, with all the impenetrable charm of a proper movie star, Costner met the film’s failure with impressive resilience. “[The first film] didn’t have overwhelming success,” Costner said at the Venice Film Festival last week. “I’ve had a lot of movies that way that have stood the test of time.”

To be fair, Costner cannot be accused of not putting his money where his mouth is. The financing of the first film included $US38 million from Costner himself.

At this point, however, only one thing is certain: the second film is finished, and a third and fourth are expected to follow. “I have to hurry and not let the rock fall back downhill,” Costner said. “I’ve gotta go put my hands on it again and start to push it up. It’s a rope that I cannot let go of.

“I don’t know how I’m gonna make [the third film] right now, but I’m gonna make it,” Costner added.

Filming on Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 3 began in May and is expected to continue into early 2025.

Costner says it is the natural life of a film “to get streamed”. “The life of a movie moves all the way to your iPhone. It just moves down the stream. So my relationship with the audience … feels like it’s not hinging on a superhero.”

Like many projects powered by individual passion – Morgan Freeman’s The Gray House, which took 12 years, and Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, which was developed for more than a decade and almost abandoned, spring to mind here – Horizon has been gestating as an idea with Costner since 1988.

“I spent the time refining it, dreaming about it, trying to make it right; I do that with all the movies I work with,” Costner says. “I don’t necessarily try to tell stories the way other people do. I think my stories are recognisable. But I think there are things just as interesting as the gunfight that can exist in a western and propel it.”

In one sense, the story of Horizon is almost uniquely American: the Wild West and the role it played in American history, and the place it holds in popular culture as a sort of American journey to nationhood in microcosm.

“It’s always a struggle,” Costner says. “People say they like them, but then we don’t see a lot of them, and they’re difficult to make, and sometimes the ones we see are remakes of old ones that we thought we liked. It’s too easy to make a black hat and a white hat.

“I like to make them feel incredibly authentic because when you do, you realise how terrifying, how hard it was, and what it took to actually survive with no law in a place where the people who existed didn’t want you, and there was nobody there to arbitrate that problem.

“It was violent, and it was ruthless, and the conditions were harsh, and the environment wasn’t always friendly and there was no infrastructure,” Costner adds. “You were it. You were the mule. If your mule died, you pulled the plow. And that’s what happened.”

The first Horizon film was shot in Moab, Utah, near where iconic westerns such as Rio Grande and The Searchers were made. Costner, who produces and directs it, has a leading role. It also stars Sienna Miller, Jamie Campbell Bower, Ella Hunt and Sam Worthington.

While it is difficult to put into words the extent to which those locations are suffused with a kind of spirit of place, Costner says there is an intangible relationship between the dry earth and the people who stand on it.

“I’m not surprised John Ford [who directed The Searchers, and other iconic westerns such as Stagecoach, Fort Apache, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance] and those guys would film there,” Costner says.

“I was moved by it,” he adds, referring to Moab. “So I’m not any different than that. The group of people who were there, this battle, this war ... was authentic. And sometimes westerns, I think they’re not effective when they don’t shoot in authentic places.”

Costner is not, he says, driven by a desire to either teach western stories to the audience or set the record straight or even reinvent the genre. “But when a history teacher told me about history, if it was just dates, I didn’t get into what the history was.

“What is the reality? Why would you hang somebody over stealing a horse? We wouldn’t do that now, but back then you would, over cattle. It was a life and death infraction. And what we have to understand is when we place ourselves there, effectively, we can make a really beautiful movie, a harsh movie, but a beautiful movie.”

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First though, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 has to survive another rout from critics. The Hollywood Reporter’s Leslie Felperin described the sequel, which was screened at the festival last week, as “the second three-hour tranche of [a] Wild West-themed soap-operatic drama”.

Felperin noted the second chapter struggles with the same issues as the first: “too much setup and not enough payoff, jagged editing that only highlights the lack of harmony between its disparate narrative strands and cliché-tinged production values that often make it feel corny and old-fashioned, and not in a good way.”

Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1 is streaming on Stan

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