The Kevin Costner Movie That Is So Bad You Can’t Stream It Anywhere
Kevin Costner's movie The Postman is so bad that it isn't available to stream on any platform.
Before Yellowstone, Kevin Costner was mostly known as a movie actor. The Dances with Wolves star has been in some fantastically underrated movies like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Field of Dreams, and some movies that are so bad you can’t stream them anywhere, like The Postman.
The Postman is a 1997 R-rated action/adventure/drama featuring Kevin Costner as the star and director. The film was written by writing duo Eric Roth and Brian Hegleland, though most people wish they hadn’t bothered. The film also stars Will Patton, known for 1998’s Armageddon, and Larenz Tate, known for 1997’s Love Jones.
The tagline for the movie seems interesting and unique enough that the film had the potential to be good. It’s about a man in a post-apocalyptic world who puts on a postman’s uniform and begins a journey with the main mission of inspiring others. Unfortunately, as intriguing as post-apocalyptic features can be, Kevin Costner and team did not put forth the execution that The Postman needed to excel.
The surmised critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes for the film says that The Postman was “a massive miscalculation in self-mythologizing by director and star Kevin Costner.” While sometimes bad films like this can make for great entertainment to make fun of, The Postman takes itself too seriously for it to be a good time. Overall, it gained a score of eight percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, while audiences on the aggregator gave it a 50 percent approval rating.
A glance through the critical ratings on Rotten Tomatoes will show that overall, critics believed that Kevin Costner’s heart was in the right place when making The Postman. Unfortunately, this is a classic example of the traditional proverb which states that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Watching this movie literally feels like you’re on your way to the bad place.
More reviews claim that The Postman isn’t too terrible for the first half of the movie, but then it keeps going … and going. Of course, Oscar-winning Kevin Costner can’t win them all, and it’s only natural to have a few bad movies in a portfolio that features a total of 65 movie and television roles. Even so, the actor/director also got a lot of flack for typecasting himself in the lead role, despite having played many similar parts in the past.
The Postman was a major failure for Kevin Costner at the box office. The film was released on more than 2,000 screens on its opening weekend, but it only brought in $5.3 million. It ended up making $21 million overall, but considering the movie’s budget was $80 million, it was written off as a huge cinematic flop.
While the Saturn Awards saw some potential in The Postman and nominated the movie for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Actor (Kevin Costner), and Best Supporting Actor (Will Patton), it didn’t end up winning any of these accolades. The awards this terrible movie did collect, however, included five Razzie Awards for Worst Actor, Director, Screenplay, Picture, and Original Song. It was also nominated for two Stinkers Awards for Worst Picture and Director, though it “lost” out to Batman & Robin for both categories.
