The box office prospects for one of the summer’s biggest swings have appeared on the horizon.
Kevin Costner‘s big-budget Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter One hit tracking on Tuesday, with one major service putting its domestic opening at $12 million, give or take. That’s not great news for Costner and those backing the independently financed Western, considering it cost $100 million to make before marketing and is being followed quickly by Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 2 on Aug 6.
Warner Bros. is only handling the film domestically, and has three weeks left to make a major marketing push, including helping Costner rally Yellowstone fans. Insiders say Costner believes that tracking isn’t capturing his fan base, which largely resides in the middle of the country.
Paramount’s prequel A Quiet Place: Day One also came on tracking Thursday, and looks to easily scare off Horizon and top the chart with a decent $40 million. One caveat for both films: Tracking has been off its game of late, creating additional angst for an already troubled box office.
The Horizon film is among the biggest gambles of the year, and is a passion project for the actor who put $38 million of his own wealth into the project to pursue his own vision of the West. A large chunk of the budget was financed through foreign sales, whereby rights are sold off territory by territory.
Horizon: Chapter 2 arrives less than two months after Chapter 1, and Costner has two more films planned. He has started filming on Chapter 3, but needs more funds to complete his vision.
“I don’t want to let this pile of things I have — whether it’s money, whether it’s [possessions] — be so important to me that I can’t think about what I want to do,” Costner told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg at Cannes, explaining why he put his own money into the movie. “I’m going to keep enough things that my family’s going to be good. … I’d like to have money, I’d like to have nice things, but I thought to myself, ‘That’s going to control me if I let it.’”
A Quiet Place: Day One, the first spinoff from the John Krasinski franchise, takes place amid the first day of an invasion of alien monsters who are blind, but will go toward any noise — and kill whatever they find.
Lupita Nyong’o stars in the feature from Pig director Michael Sarnoski. A Quiet Place became a surprise hit in 2018 and catapulted Krasinski to A-list director status. It opened to $50 million on its way to $340.9 million globally, while the 2021 sequel earned $297.372 million, despite pandemic challenges. He produces and earned a story by credit on the screenplay.
