by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 | 2024
While Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis may have captured much of the attention at this year's Cannes Film Festival, another self-financed passion project by an old-school Hollywood filmmaker made its debut on the Croisette to a much more muted response. Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is the first part of planned series of four films, one of which, Chapter 2, has already been shot and was planned for release in August before it was unceremoniously delayed due to Chapter 1's underwhelming performance at the box office.
For most of its life, the Cannon Group was a minor studio known for brawny B-movies like Death Wish, Cobra, Missing in Action, and Masters of the Universe. But during the 1980s, under the direction of co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who bought the company in 1979, Cannon also used some of its profits to take chances on risky auteur-driven projects in an attempt to gain some prestige. One such project was Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, a deal Golan and Globus infamously made with Godard on a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival, where the pair were tenaciously courting filmmakers.