Kevin Costner Western ‘Horizon’ Sells to France Before Cannes World Premiere

‘Horizon’

Warner Bros.

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, the Western epic directed by and starring Kevin Costner, only debuts at the Cannes Film Festival 2024 on Sunday. But the movie and the second part of the story have already sold to the country where Chapter 1 will get its world premiere in an out-of-competition slot.

Metropolitan FilmExport will distribute the old-school Western from Warner Bros. in France, it emerged on Thursday. Daniel Baur’s K5 International is handling the international rights at the Cannes film market.

Warner Bros. is betting big on Horizon, releasing the first entry in Costner’s multi-film frontier epic on June  28 across North America, followed by Chapter 2 on Aug. 16. The marketing team behind Barbie believes that, for the domestic market, two $100  million Westerns from the star of Yellowstone are as good as money in the bank. 

And while the Old West has often been a tough sell for international buyers and audiences in foreign markets, Horizon has received much interest. “There’s a lack of big, $100  million projects on the independent market, and with fewer studio releases this summer because of the strike, [international] distributors are excited to have not one but two movies of this size available,” Baur recently told THR. 

Given that with a very big exception in the form of Costner’s 1990 blockbuster Dances With Wolves — which earned some $424 million globally, more than half of it outside North America — the international box office for traditional Hollywood Westerns has often been disappointing, the industry is closely following the performance of Horizon.