Kevin Costner exercised his considerable muscle in Hollywood to sabotage Tombstone before it could get made, and he came very close to succeeding. Westerns were essentially a dead genre by the beginning of the ’80s, but over the years, they’ve had brief bursts of activity. The start of the ’90s gave fans of the genre a treat with both Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Tombstone. The latter film was a surprise hit in 1993, and aside from being a great movie, features an incredible ensemble cast that includes Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton and many more.
Every once in a while in Hollywood, two movies emerge that share the same basic premise, and it’s a race to see which wins at the box office. A recent example would be 2013’s competing “Die Hard in the White House” movies Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down, where the former won the fight and spawned a franchise. Tombstone itself faced competition from Wyatt Earp, an epic retelling of Earp’s entire life that also featured an impressive cast consisting of Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman and others. Costner didn’t consider the rivalry between the two movies very friendly, however.
As he recounted to True West in 2006, just as the film was gearing up to shoot, he heard that Costner had been going to every major studio to convince them not to distribute Tombstone. At this time, Costner was coming off the back of critical and commercial smashes like Dances with Wolves and The Bodyguard and was one of the biggest movie stars in the world; thus his request had some weight behind it. Russell was told that Costner had basically shut down every avenue of release for Tombstone aside from Disney and Buena Vista.
This came with the concession that Willem Dafoe, who was in line to play Doc Holliday, had to be replaced by Val Kilmer. While Dafoe would have no doubt delivered an excellent performance, this recasting worked in the movie’s favor, as Kilmer delivered possibly his best-ever performance as Doc. Despite his tactics to sabotage Tombstone, Russell never held a grudge against Costner, stating “He was powerful enough at the time, which I always respected. I thought it was good hardball.”
Tombstone Vs Wyatt Earp: Which Biopic Is Best?
Russell feels the studio did little to promote Tombstone, which became a robust hit regardless. The film grossed over three times its $25 million production and received mostly great reviews. This is in contrast to Costner’s Wyatt Earp, which not only failed to recoup its $60 million budget but also received lackluster reviews. Co-star Michael Madsen passed on playing Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction to star in Wyatt Earp instead, which is a decision he later lamented as he felt the Western was slow and boring.
Madsen’s assessment is correct because while the cast – especially Quaid – do good work, Wyatt Earp is an oddly lifeless take on such an iconic figure. The film is filled with inert drama and at over three hours in length, can be painfully slow. Tombstone on the other hand is filled with fantastic scenes and performances, and the action sequences are rousing and well-staged. This Kurt Russell Western is almost endlessly rewatchable and it’s possible to spot something new each time, while Wyatt Earp is something of a struggle to sit through once.