On Sunday, Yellowstone finally returns, delivering the back half of its fifth and final season nearly two years after the season’s first half began to air. But all is not well in the land of the Duttons.
Since its 2018 debut, Yellowstone—a sweeping family drama that is often compared to Succession, only if the Roy family did extralegal killings in the vicinity of Montana bovines instead of making Fox News—has become one of the biggest shows on television. At its core is Kevin Costner, who plays family patriarch John Dutton, a role for which Variety reported in 2022 he is paid north of $1 million per episode.
At this point, Costner’s squabbles with creator-writer-director-producer polymath Taylor Sheridan and Paramount Network are well known. Since the first half of Season 5 concluded, there’s been a steady drumbeat of stories about the Yellowstone star’s break with the series. Reporting indicated that Costner wanted more creative control of the show, as well as more room to work on his Western passion project Horizon. Multiple outlets reported in 2023 that the actor had demanded narrow shoot windows: 50 days for the first half of Season 5 and just a week for the second half. (Costner’s rep called the latter claim “an absolute lie.”)
Now, at last, Yellowstone is back. But will Costner take part in the series’ much-awaited finale? Well, take a look at the trailer.
At first, the answer seems to be yes, if in some lesser form. “Everyone’s forgotten who runs this valley,” Costner growls at the promo reel’s beginning, adding that it’s “time to remind them.” “This war is just beginning,” he growls at the end. In the 60 seconds between those proclamations, there are three fleeting shots of Costner that total a whopping five seconds, all sans dialogue. Instead of the show’s nominal star, we see other feuding factions: the three Dutton children and their assorted paramours, grizzled ranch hands, and leaders from the Broken Rock reservation.
But even that paltry presence is deceptive. Costner’s “everyone’s forgotten who runs this valley” line isn’t new—it’s from all the way back in Season 1. This summer, Costner confirmed reports from last year that he wouldn’t appear in any future Yellowstone episodes. “I’m not going to be able to continue Season 5B or into the future,” he said in an Instagram video. “I just wanted to let you know that I won’t be returning.”
So however the trailer makes it seem, there apparently won’t be any new Costner footage: Over the last week, the cast has made the rounds talking about how different it felt to film episodes without him. Maybe the season will insert some old scenes—perhaps via flashbacks or even something legitimately unseen from a prior cutting room floor, though that feels contractually fishy. But Yellowstone still has six episodes to get through, and there’s simply no way the show will manage to stretch its vintage Costner clips that far. In short: John Dutton has gotta go, and fast.
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
It’s near farcical to imagine what is surely about to unfold. Yes, Succession killed off Logan Roy early into its final season. But it’s hard to overstate how much more central John Dutton’s character is on Yellowstone. Sure, we spend time aplenty with the Dutton kids and their individual dramas, much as we did with Kendall, Roman, and Shiv (and, er, Connor). But John Dutton isn’t just the star that the Dutton kids rotate around—he’s the parent, lover, direct employer, or business rival of nearly every character on Yellowstone; a huge number of scenes take place inside his Dutton compound home.
Indeed, the show has always been an explicit Kevin Costner vehicle. Check out the trailer for Season 1, which begins with the text “ACADEMY AWARD WINNER KEVIN COSTNER,” scarcely makes it a few seconds without showing him on-screen, and reminds you once more that this is ACADEMY AWARD WINNER KEVIN COSTNER near the end. How about the promos for Seasons 2 and 3? That’s right: It’s ACADEMY AWARD WINNER KEVIN COSTNER.
By the time the first half of Season 5 debuted in 2022, Costner’s name had been dropped from the trailer—and Sheridan’s appeared instead. Maybe that’s because of the show’s growing popularity and Costner’s costars’ (to say nothing of Sheridan’s) increasing visibility; maybe Costner had already begun to chafe at the series’ demands behind the scenes. But Costner is all over the trailer regardless: He appears in or does a voice-over in 45 of the trailer’s 90 seconds.
Making matters even worse is the fact that the first half of Season 5 saw John Dutton elected governor of Montana.
And yet. No one since Poochie and Joey Tribbiani has so brazenly dared a show’s writers—er, writer—to kill him off. Not that he’s made it easy: Last year, Puck reported that Costner had a “moral death” clause in his Yellowstone contract that explicitly forbade John Dutton from dying in a way that would cause “shame or embarrassment” to the character. So there goes the tumble down an elevator shaft. And Sheridan has all but ruled out the fan-favorite theory that your dad’s favorite rancher would die in a car wreck.
In theory, John Dutton could survive off-screen. Say he gets really, really invested in the Montana State Legislature and relocates full-time to Helena, or the feds finally catch on to his many, many crimes and he flees somewhere without an extradition policy. Maybe he just goes out for a pack of cigarettes and never comes back.
But it’s far more likely that the Dutton patriarch is about to meet a sudden end—with an extra hint in the fact that Paramount Network declined to make advance screeners available to reporters. Unfortunately for Yellowstone, John Dutton isn’t just the show’s star—he’s also canonically somewhere near invincible. To date, he’s survived a cancer scare, a ruptured ulcer that required a veterinarian to conduct impromptu intestinal surgery, being shot and left for dead on the side of a road, and myriad other near misses.
So how do you kill John Dutton? Thanks to Costner, we’re almost certainly about to find out.
