For a time there Kevin Costner was king of the box-office. The actor broke through in the mid-late 1980s with “Silverado” and a scored a major lead role in Brian dePalma’s “The Untouchables” before firing up libidos in “Bull Durham” and resolving daddy issues everywhere in “Field of Dreams”.
“Dances with Wolves” in 1990 scored him numerous Oscars while “JFK” and “A Perfect World” scored him critical acclaim. “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” and “The Bodyguard” were also major box-office successes and cultural events which made him one of the biggest stars on the planet.
It all changed in the mid-late 1990s though. His costly 190-minute “Wyatt Earp” made back only about 40% of its $63 million budget and snagged mixed reviews. Though painted as one of the biggest flops ever made due to the insanely costly budget, “Waterworld” actually scored only mixed (not bad) reviews. Box-office wise “Waterworld” was also a global performer with $264 million (in 2020’s dollars just shy of a half billion) and eventually became profitable thanks to home video and licensing rights.
Several romantic dramas like “Tin Cup” and “Message in a Bottle” snagged muted reviews and decent box-office. But it was his decision to pass on the film “Air Force One,” which he’d been helping develop and was originally going to play the U.S. President in, for his own project “The Postman” that changed it all.
Set in a post-apocalyptic and neo-Western version of the United States sixteen years after the world collapsed, Costner played a nomadic drifter who stumbles across the uniform of an old United States Postal Service mail carrier, and unwittingly inspires hope through an empty promise of a “Restored United States of America”.
The film was a major critical and commercial failure. The film cost $80 million and pulled in only a quarter of that in box-office, while critical reviews were utterly dire and painted the film as the textbook example of everything wrong with a vanity project by a filmmaker.
Recently as part of a retrospective interview with The Daily Beast, Costner was asked about the “prescient nature” of what the film did in the 1990s, especially in the wake of the challenges facing the U.S. Post Office this year. Costner says he remains proud of his work on the film:
“You know, listen, a movie is what it is when it comes out, and it has a chance to be revisited. I was always kind of proud of it. I thought I probably made a mistake not starting the movie off saying, ‘Once upon a time…’ Because it’s kind of like a fairy tale: ‘Once upon a time, when things got really rotten, the only thing that could stand the test of time was the Post Office. The only thing that people could count on.’ I didn’t say that and I probably should’ve, because it is like a fairy tale that you’d read to your children at night. That’s how I did the movie.
It deals with the nature of fame, you know what I mean? It’s a very subtle thing. I think Postman actually is kind of a very funny movie, when you watch it. There’s humor wrapped all the way through it. Just dealing a little bit with the nature of fame, and dealing with somebody who’s famous, and him saying, ‘No, you’re famous.’ That’s all the movie was trying to do.”
Costner’s career took a long time to recover from that failure. Subsequent films like “The Guardian,” “Dragonfly,” “3 Days to Kill,” “3000 Miles to Graceland,” “McFarland, USA” and “Draft Day” were all either forgotten or dismissed though he still snagged good critical notices for his turns such as in “Thirteen Days” and “Mr. Brooks”.
More recently he’s been on the comeback trail with well-regarded supporting roles in “Man of Steel,” “Hidden Figures” and “Molly’s Game”. Success nearly a decade ago with the “Hatfields & McCoys” series paved the way for his current major success with the series “Yellowstone” which this year had the most-watched cable premiere of 2020.
