<\/p>\n
Kevin Costner’s career has seen some dizzying peaks and astonishingly low valleys, but we’ve never seen the legendary movie star and multiple Oscar winner as down and just about out as he is right now. A newly-published The Hollywood Reporter<\/a> expose has shone a light on not just Costner’s\u00a0surly behavior on the “Yellowstone” set<\/a>,\u00a0but also his humiliating failure to secure financing to finish his proposed four-part Western epic “Horizon: An American Saga” (the first entry tanked at the box office, which has left the finished second film without a distributor) and his alleged violation of on-set safety protocols when he forced a stuntwoman to perform an unscripted rape scene. It seems Costner’s reputation for being difficult has caught up with him now that he’s no longer a bankable movie star and is persona non grata in the wildly popular “Yellowstone” universe (which revived his career in the 2010s). THR’s article paints a grim picture, but it gets unduly harsh and downright ahistorical when its author cites “Waterworld” as the flop that kicked off Costner’s fall from commercial grace.<\/p>\n Here’s the problem with this assertion: “Waterworld” wasn’t a flop.<\/p>\n According to THR’s story, when “Waterworld” hit theaters on July 28, 1995, it soon “became one of the biggest flops since … well, ‘Heaven’s Gate.'” The reference to Michael Cimino’s catastrophic Western flop<\/a> is a callback to the reporting on Costner’s directing debut, “Dances with Wolves” \u2014 which, with its daunting three-hour run time and association with what was then considered a dead genre, was vilified pre-release as “Kevin’s Gate.” Much crow was consumed when the movie became a hit and Costner won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Then, five years later, the hugely over-budget “Waterworld” was derided as “Fishtar.” It was anything but.<\/p>\n