From the awe-inspiring mountain ranges to the vast deserts, Utah’s versatile landscape has drawn filmmakers for 100 years, shooting classic movies from The Searchers to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In recent years, one of the biggest productions to hit Southern Utah was Kevin Costner’s hotly-anticipated Horizon: An American Saga.
The iconic Hollywood star, best known for his classics Dances With Wolves, Field of Dreams and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, has made Utah the setting for his hugely ambitious four-part Western saga.
The first part of the saga, which premiered at Cannes and hit cinemas earlier this summer, is a multi-faceted chronicle that covers the Civil War expansion and settlement of the American West.
Kevin Costner believed that Utah was the perfect destination to film his movie. “There’s a lot of heaven in Utah,” he said in an interview with the Deseret News.
“I knew the story wanted to be set there. I thought that it would be the best possible thing for the movie,” he added. “There are these wide, open spaces that almost defy imagination. That kind of look is fabulous for a Western.”
Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter One covers the westward expansion and manifest destiny—the concept that white Americans were divinely ordained to settle North America.
Therefore, the movie is set across various states as the settlers make their way West through Arizona, Wyoming and New Mexico. However, it is predominantly filmed in Utah.
The Utah landscape gave Costner what he needed to bring his vision to life. For the rest, he got crews to build sets from scratch.The crew built a fort along the Colorado River outside of Moab and even designed an entire village in the La Sal mountains.
The second installment of the saga was slated to hit cinemas on Aug. 16, but Costner delayed the release and instead premiered the movie on Sept. 7 at the prestigious Venice Film Festival. This will be eventually followed by Chapter Three, which entered production in last May.
The Utah Film Commission estimates that Horizon has pumped more than $120 million into the state’s economy, with the most spending in the St. George area and rural Utah. The production also made good on its commitment of hiring local cast and crew and purchasing materials and services locally, says Joyce Kelly of Greater Zion Convention and Tourism.
The legacy and impact of the movie in Utah stretches far beyond the boost to the local economy, as Kevin Costner is in the process of building a state-of-the-art film studio near Zion National Park.
“I was out on a location scout with Kevin years ago,” says Kelly, when they unwittingly scouted the location of the future studio. “And he said, ‘Joyce, I’m going to film on this spot one day.’”
Costner got his wish when filming on the spot for Horizon’s next chapter. At the end of the shoot, he announced it would also be the future home of Territory Film Studios.
The studio itself will be home to 70,000 square feet of sound stages and 51,000 square feet of production warehouses. It’s exciting news for the next generation of filmmakers in Utah, as there are currently an estimated 4,000 students enrolled in film school and higher education and colleges throughout Utah.
A career in film and TV will now be a realistic prospect for these aspiring students, and they can achieve this without moving to L.A. or New York but instead staying in Utah and continuing to contribute to the booming industry.
Utah and The Western
Despite the variety of movies shot in Utah, it is most closely associated with the Western genre. The vast landscapes place the audience in the heart of the American frontier as they feel everything from the beauty of the locations to the potential dangers of the terrain.
The deep association between Utah and the Western genre started 100 years ago with two silent movies in 1924, including The Deadwood Coach. The movie was made during a period when Southern Utah was experiencing agricultural depression and there weren’t many avenues to make money for the local economy.
The Parry Brothers wanted to change the fortunes of Southern Utah and decided to entice Hollywood productions to film here as they took photographs of the landscape and pitched around to big-wig producers. Hollywood was drawn by the beauty of the state and has been ever since with classics such as Back To the Future, Stagecoach and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid being filmed in Utah.
The magnitude of movies being filmed in Utah is undoubtedly a great advertisement for tourists, but it also has great benefit to the economy by creating jobs and using local services throughout production. A 2019 report by the Utah Film Commission found that Utah’s film incentive generated $669.1 million in economic impact over a five-year period. An incentive that would not have seen the state legislature raising its cap were it not for the intervention by Kevin Costner.
Meanwhile, Utah’s allure shows no sign of fading as filmmakers continue to choose the state as their preferred filming destination for Westerns and beyond.
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