In Westerns, duels between gunslingers are commonplace. They occur less frequently in the real cinema business. This makes the story of failure that Kevin Costner experienced 30 years ago when he emerged as the loser of a film duel all the more incredible.
30 years ago, Kevin Costner started a western feud
We travel back in time: 30 years before Yellowstone and Horizon, Kevin Costner had just finished his success in Dances with Wolves in the early 90s and turned to a new western legend: the lawman Wyatt Earp. However, they went to the famous marshal two films in production at the same time: Tombstone and Wyatt Earp – The Life of a Legend. And so began a real cinema feud.
Kurt Russell plays Wyatt Earp in George P. Cosmatos’ Tombstone, while Kevin Costner played the lead role in Lawrence Kasdan’s film. As Espinof reports, things initially looked different: Costner was originally supposed to in Tombstone as a law enforcement officer before he switched to the competing projectwhich was initially conceived as a miniseries. Costner had previously filmed Silverado with director Kasdan. He was also unconvinced by the focus on multiple characters in Tombstone, while he was given the sole lead role in Wyatt Earp. (Which seems almost ironic when you look at Costner’s Horizon today.)
With that, the feud gauntlet was thrown out. Tombstones screenwriter Kevin Jarre even went so far as to cast the Wyatt Earp film adaptation as “Trying to destroy my film”to denote. With two westerns on the same topic, one had to lose. Kevin’s Costner is said to have sabotaged Tombstone so much that major distributors eventually refused to distribute it any further. And more than that: The Costner film confiscated all of Hollywood’s western costumes for themselves, so that Tombstone ultimately had to resort to costume rental companies in Europe.
Western defeat: Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp lost the cinema duel
Nevertheless, the Western Wyatt Earp – The Life of a Legend ultimately emerged as the inferior film in the competition, as the comparison of budgets and box office results shows:
At Moviepilot, both films have the same rating today: 6.7 out of 10 points. Tombstone (with a running time of 131 minutes) streams on Disney+ *, while Wyatt Earp (191 minutes) can only be rented or bought in the stream, for example on Amazon *.
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