Here’s why people soon will see Utah and Kevin Costner on a ‘40-foot-high’ movie screen

Movie fans will see southern Utah landscapes online Monday and in theaters this week, in a trailer advertising one of the biggest film projects ever made in Utah.

The first full trailer for “Horizon: An American Saga,” director-writer-star Kevin Costner’s four-movie epic Western story, was released online Monday.

The movies’ distributor, Warner Bros., likely will include the trailer in theaters — “40 feet wide and 20 feet high,” as Costner puts it — with its big release this weekend: director Denis Villeneuve’s much-anticipated blockbuster “Dune: Part Two.”

The first movie in the “Horizon” series is slated to be released in theaters June 28, and the second one on August 16. Dates for the remaining installments have yet to be announced.

“I hope it’s worth [the audience’s] money,” Costner said in a virtual media event Friday, ahead of Monday’s trailer release. “I just hope people feel they were taken somewhere.”

Costner’s production company shot the films in southern Utah last year. “It was the best place in the world for me to go,” Costner said, adding that when he drives around Utah, “my head’s on a swivel. … When you go through Utah, it’s magic.”

The production employed more than 500 local crew members and actors, Costner said, and spent about $100 million in the state. And the production worked in a hurry: The crew spent 52 shooting days in Utah, Costner said, compared to 106 days on his first directing effort, the Oscar-winning Western “Dances With Wolves.”

“I know we had an impact on the state, but the state has had an impact on me,” Costner said.

Other states may offer bigger production incentives — Utah’s program offers a 20%-to-25% tax rebate, up to $12 million — but, Costner said, “I bypassed the smart business decision to go where my money could stretch farther. I didn’t want to rob the audience of a second of what Utah is.”

Costner is familiar with Utah as a shooting location. Most of the first three seasons of the modern Western series “Yellowstone,” in which Costner played the patriarch of a powerful ranching family, was shot in and around Park City. (The production moved to Montana in Season 4.) Earlier this month, Costner announced plans to build a $40 million movie studio in the St. George area.

Neither the trailer nor Costner are giving away too many details about the plot of “Horizon.” The saga is set, he said, in a 15-year-stretch before, during and after the Civil War — a time when people started looking west.

“Some people came west with hope,” Costner said. “Others came west because they were damaged. Other people came west because they were running away from something.”

Costner’s character, Hayes Ellison, seems to fit the second and third categories, based on what’s shown in the trailer. He carries a revolver, but tells one nasty character (Jamie Campbell Bower), “I haven’t had much need of it so far.” Elsewhere in the trailer, though, he’s using it in a gunfight.

The trailer also features Luke Wilson as the leader of a wagon train, Danny Huston and Sam Worthington (”Avatar”) as U.S. Army officers, and Sienna Miller (“American Sniper”) and Abbey Lee (“Old”) as women Ellison tries to protect.

Other cast members mentioned in the trailer are: Jena Malone (“The Hunger Games”), Michael Rooker (“Guardians of the Galaxy”), Isabelle Fuhrman (“Orphan”), Jeff Fahey (“Lost”), Will Patton (“Armageddon”), Tatanka Means (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Owen Crow Shoe and Ella Hunt (“Anna and the Apocalypse”).