Did Kevin Costner Really Try to Sabotage Tombstone?

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: Kevin Costner tried to sabotage Tombstone in favor of his own Wyatt Earp film.

Game 4 of the 1996 World Series was a back-and-forth battle between the Yankees and the Braves. The Yankees, needing a win to even the series, faced a tough Atlanta closer in Mark Wohlers, but Jim Leyritz managed to hit a crucial three-run home run in the eighth inning. Later, with the game tied in the 11th, Braves manager Bobby Cox intentionally walked Bernie Williams, hoping to face the weaker hitter Andy Fox. Cox believed the Yankees wouldn’t use their last pinch-hitter, the left-handed Wade Boggs, who had been struggling against lefties. However, Yankee manager Joe Torre surprised everyone by sending Boggs to the plate, and Boggs drew a walk to put the Yankees ahead. Torre then made another smart move, sticking with left-handed pitcher Graeme Lloyd, who struck out Ryan Klesko, a Braves player who struggled against lefties. The Yankees won that game and ultimately went on to win the World Series.

Of course, what happened between the productions of Tombstone and Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp wasn’t really sabotage – it was just typical competition between rival movies. However, a story has spread that Costner tried to undermine Tombstone because of his own film. Here’s why that story doesn’t make sense, but continues to be told.

Where did the claim that Kevin Costner sabotage Tombstone come from?

Many people are aware that Kevin Costner and the original director and writer of Tombstone, Kevin Jarre, disagreed about the film’s focus. Costner wanted the story to center solely on Wyatt Earp, while Jarre envisioned a film with a larger ensemble cast. Interestingly, after Jarre was removed from the project, the new team reduced the roles of supporting characters to emphasize the relationship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. This disagreement led Costner to pursue his own Wyatt Earp movie. He originally planned it as a lengthy miniseries, and Dan Gordon wrote a script with that in mind. However, Lawrence Kasdan (who had previously worked with Costner on the Western Silverado) rewrote the script as a feature film, though it still ended up being quite long.

It’s common knowledge that Hollywood often has multiple similar projects in development simultaneously – we’ve seen it before with films like Armageddon and Deep Impact being released in the same year. However, more often, studios avoid a project if another one is already underway, especially if it stars a big name. This happened to Jarre back in 1991 when his Dracula project was cancelled after Francis Ford Coppola announced his Dracula film (which became 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula). As a result, Costner’s competing Wyatt Earp movie felt like a deliberate attempt to sabotage his film.

It’s crucial to remember that Jarre felt threatened by Costner’s similar project, recalling how his previous Dracula film was derailed by competition. However, the question is whether Costner, at the peak of his popularity, truly intended to sabotage Jarre’s project by making a competing Wyatt Earp film. It seems obvious he understood there was a risk of that happening, but does that automatically make it sabotage?

Did Kevin Costner actually sabotage Tombstone?

It’s clear there was some behind-the-scenes maneuvering happening. Kurt Russell explained that his agency, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), didn’t even send him the script for Tombstone. Instead, it came from his previous agent at William Morris, who urged him to take the role, but also warned him, as Russell remembers, that “there’s a lot of politics involved here.”

The situation was complicated by Kevin Costner planning his own Wyatt Earp movie. Because Costner was a major client of the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), it was expected they’d support his project. However, Kurt Russell ended up making Tombstone. Russell was also a CAA client, which clearly shows the agency didn’t stop him from taking the role.

According to Russell, Kevin Jarre explained that Kevin Costner leveraged his star power to prevent other studios from distributing Tombstone. Russell shared with Henry Cabot Beck that Costner, while working on Wyatt Earp for Warner Bros., had effectively limited their distribution options to Disney’s Buena Vista. Russell admired Costner’s strong-arm tactics at the time, noting it was a shrewd move. He confirmed that Buena Vista was their only viable release option, a fact Jarre had also told him, stating, ‘We were sunk unless we went with Buena Vista.’

I’m certain Russell heard that from Jarre. However, it’s important to remember how Hollywood operates, and what Jarre was going through at the time. He’d recently lost a project because another, more famous actor was already working on something similar. And it’s true that studios generally wouldn’t invest in a film if a major star like Kevin Costner was already developing a comparable project with a large studio like Warner Bros.

What looks like deliberate disruption is often just typical rivalry in Hollywood. Kevin Costner faced what some call “weird competition” with the film Tombstone, but it wasn’t actual sabotage. A common story is that Tombstone had to source costumes from Europe because Costner bought up all the Western-era costumes for Wyatt Earp. While that might be partly true, it’s understandable – Wyatt Earp was a large-scale film and naturally required a lot of costumes! Similarly, when the Smashing Pumpkins needed Edwardian costumes for their music video “Tonight, Tonight,” they struggled to find any, as James Cameron had already acquired them all for Titanic. Was Cameron trying to hinder the Smashing Pumpkins, or was he simply a filmmaker making a massive movie that needed extensive period clothing?

It doesn’t seem like there’s any proof Costner tried to actively harm the other film, he simply made a competing one. We’ve likely been influenced by Maurice Jarre’s open discussion of the events, and it’s more dramatic to call it “sabotage” than just acknowledge it was competition. Costner probably realized making his own Wyatt Earp movie would make it difficult for another one to happen, but that’s a normal part of filmmaking – it wasn’t sabotage, just competing projects.

So I say that the legend is…

STATUS: False

Want to learn more about movie myths? Visit our site for a collection of urban legends about film. You can find stories focused on Westerns specifically by clicking here.

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2025-10-22 05:07