Author: Tyler Hummel. Tyler is a Wisconsin-based freelance critic and journalist, a member of the Music City Film Critics Association, a regular film and literature contributor at Geeks Under Grace, and was the 2021 College Fix Fellow at Main Street Nashville.

2024 was the year that the box office ceased to function. Film has changed greatly in the past 20 years, with the model of film distribution shrinking and dispersing as studios produce fewer films and streaming services fill the airwaves with so many shows that they are all diluted by an ocean of content. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and David Lynch—who were the vanguards of prior regimes of the film industry and produced successful films like Goodfellas and Blue Velvet—have struggled to get their recent films produced in the new landscape. 

This past year was notable insofar as it marked the last breath of that prior generation of auteur filmmakers, as blockbuster after blockbuster was released to complete apathy from mainstream audiences. Maybe ticket prices are simply too expensive nowadays ($10.53 per person plus snacks) or people were trained too well by COVID lockdowns to wait three months for the film to be free on Peacock or Hulu. In any case, the result is that audiences no longer tolerate original films and are reticent to see a film that isn’t receiving massive good word of mouth. 

Since COVID-19 died down, many major films have escaped the lackadaisical box office of recent years. Top Gun Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, Jurassic World: Dominion, Spiderman: No Way Home, Oppenheimer, Barbie, Super Mario Brothers, Dune: Part Two, Inside Out 2, Moana 2, Wicked, and Deadpool And Wolverine are all massive successes. However, few of these successes speak to positive trends in the film industry. Eight of them are sequels, one of them is based on a doll brand, one is based on a popular video game franchise, one is an adaptation of the most popular musical of the 2000s, and only one of them can truly be said to be an original work, but it was given attention because it came from the director of The Dark Knight. 

Comparatively, 2024 was the year that cinema was left out to dry if it wasn’t nostalgia-driven and safe. And frankly, safe and recognizable brand films suffered too. Superhero films Joker: Folie à Deux, The Crow, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter all failed. The adaptation of the popular Borderlands video game franchise flopped. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s new Christmas actioner Red One was dead on arrival. Original projects like Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Matthew Vaughn’s Argyle, Ava DuVernay’s Origin, and Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me To the Moon all struggled to garner attention. Most surprisingly, George Miller’s long-awaited follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road barely earned its budget back and has likely prematurely ended the Mad Max franchise despite plans for additional sequels.  

Of all of last year’s great box office failures, the one that most broke my heart was the failure of Kevin Costner’s long-awaited passion project Horizon: An American Saga. The first part of his epic four-part western was released in June but only grossed $38.7 million on a $50 million budget. This resulted in the indefinite delay of the second chapter from its planned August release date and indefinitely paused filming on the third and fourth chapters. 

Being a spiritual successor to Costner’s previously self-financed westerns Dances With Wolves and Open Range, Horizon felt like a sure thing. As I wrote previously in my commentary for The Federalist, Costner mortgaged one of his homes and invested $38 million of his own money to finance the films, even quitting the final season of Yellowstone in the process. He was fully invested in telling this ambitious story of civilization converging on the American frontier that he may never get to finish. 

It didn’t help that the film’s reviews panned the film critically and morally. Its structure was lampooned for being too similar to a television pilot. It was accused of being tedious and disjointed. Additionally, many progressive critics have lambasted its portrayal of Native Americans and women as a “misogynistic, racist, retrograde mess.” Online clickbait farm Ranker went as far as to dismiss it as a film “absolutely no one liked.” While the audiences who did see it thought more of it than mainstream critics, strong word of mouth couldn’t carry the film over the finish line. 

Horizon: An American Saga—insofar as 75% of its story has yet to be told—is flawed, but it is also a deeply passionate and ambitious work. It is one of the few post-Unforgiven Westerns to unironically embrace its genre, whereas most modern entries like Django Unchained, Killers Of The Flower Moon, Power Of The Dog, Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Bone Tomahawk, Deadwood, and The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford approach the genre through the lens of deconstruction and embrace ultra-violence that was anathema to the great westerns of classic Hollywood. It is sincere in its embrace of the idea that the American West was the founding myth of America’s self-identity and is unfurling a complex narrative to show how the march of civilization and manifest destiny played out in all its facets. 

Unfortunately, the short-term failure of Horizon: Chapter 1 has meant that Horizon: Chapter 2 has been left to rot. As of February 7, the film has only been publicly screened twice, first at the Venice Film Festival in September and then at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this past week. As of the time of writing, there are no official plans to release the film in cinemas or on streaming, but its most recent premiere suggests that a wide release is growing near. 

Costner and Warner Brother’s strategy seems to be to let the first film build a reputation through strong word of mouth before releasing the second film, thus helping it recoup its losses more than it would’ve had the film released in August. As of now, Horizon: Chapter One is widely available to stream on Netflix and HBO Max. Physical copies of the film were released in September and are still on the shelves at most of my local Walmart locations with a discount. 

Some responsibility falls upon us—the audiences who view and pay for these films—to pick up the slack and help this situation. Hollywood is not very sympathetic at the moment, filled with the most abusive, backstabbing, and hypocritically moralistic people on the planet. That said, Hollywood speaks through dollars. The past few years have told Hollywood that people only want more nostalgia slop and safe creative decisions. 

Original films, creatively risky films, and even films that take bold stances on complicated issues keep the filmmaking ecosystem healthy, but our dollars have made it clear we don’t want those sorts of things. We complain about Disney films being “woke” and “creatively bankrupt,” and then hand the company $5.46 billion in ticket sales. We ought to vote with our dollars and give films like Horizon, Furiosa, Megalopolis, etc.a chance, even if they disappoint us. Thankfully, the recent success of Robert Egger’s Nosferatu, with a global box office haul of $173 million, shows there might be some hope on the horizon for modestly budgeted auteur works. 

While I respect Costner’s diligence and caution as he approaches the second film’s release, I must also admit that his timidity is annoying. I’m a fanboy of Horizon: An American Saga and I’ve stanned it since long before it was released. I’ve written about it at least three times.  As much as the current state of the box office breaks my heart, my patience is growing thin. The box office isn’t going to get better by not releasing films. And like the Snyder fanboys before me, I’m happy to take a minor stand and say that it’s time for Horizon: Chapter 2 to see the light of day. It’s time to #ReleaseTheCostnerCut.