Box office Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 grossed $29 million in the United States and Canada, and $9.7 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $38.7 million. The film made $4.1 million on its first day, including $800,000 from Thursday night previews. It went on to debut to $11 million, finishing in third behind
Inside Out 2 and
A Quiet Place: Day One. In its second weekend the film made $5.4 million (a drop of 51%), finishing in sixth. Losing nearly 750 theaters in its third weekend the film made $2.4 million, finishing in seventh.
Critical response Audiences surveyed by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B–" on an A+ to F scale. A review at
RogerEbert.com wrote, "Even with the cataclysmic scenes of death, the first hour does little to endear these characters. They're disparate people whose connections aren't immediately clear and only become vaguely obvious toward the picture's conclusion.", and further noted, "While the first film in the possible
Horizon series does well in setting up future pictures, continuing the momentum Costner gained before he left
Yellowstone, this single film is a chore to sit through. It rarely gives viewers what they want: seeing Costner on the open range. It gives us few memorable characters outside of Costner: I can't remember the name of a single figure without looking at my notes."
Forbes was more positive and found the film had a "great sense of place" while
The Guardian found the film was "an unapologetically old-school western". The BBC website was very critical and described the film as a non-film: "It's like the tantalising pilot episode of a television series – but a pilot episode that drags on and on for three hours." A mixed review in
Esquire, however, expressed hope about the sequels. Addressing the duration and the serialization of the film, Owen Gleiberman of
Variety adopted the opposite approach: "Yet I think the idea is that the design of it all will come into focus as we see
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 2 (later this summer), and then, at some point,
Chapter 3 (which is now scheduled) and maybe, if all goes according to plan, more chapters. I seriously hope not. I'm not sure how much juice there is to squeeze out of these characters, but even if there is some I don't want to see movies turn into television. Just about every Western of the studio era came in at two hours or less, and so did most of the revisionist Westerns (and some of those were
complicated). There's a reason for that. It's all the time they needed."
Richard Brody of
The New Yorker gave the film a negative review, writing that "the inflated production of
Horizon shows in its aesthetic. The dramatic format seems borrowed from television, with multiple threads jumpily interweaved, to ward off impatience. With so many balls in the air at once, the movie lacks the kind of patient observation that this story demands.
Accolades The movie was nominated in the category of
Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature at the
23rd Visual Effects Society Awards. ==Sequels==