Kevin Costner's 'Yellowstone' Feud May Have Determined the Outcome of His Character

[This story contains major spoilers from the Yellowstone Season 5B premiere.]

Yellowstone viewers have been waiting for almost two years to see the second half of Season 5 and it surely didn’t disappoint. Fans knew that Kevin Costner exited the series, but nobody knew how they would handle his character, John Dutton, until now. We are warning you not to proceed any further if you don’t want to be spoiled. 

Creator Taylor Sheridan killed off Costner’s character and that was evident in the first moments of the show that premiered on Paramount + on Sunday, Nov. 10. He didn’t drag the disappearance of John Dutton out all season, the show got right to the point and got him off the ranch landscape. While the aftermath is going to handle how the character’s deal with emotional fallout, it seems that the real-life feud between Sheridan and Costner might have affected the outcome of John Dutton. 

Director Christina Voros spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the explosive episode, and she was trying to dodge the feud question when she was asked Sheridan’s choice to lead with John Dutton’s death. “I can’t talk to the decision: It’s Taylor’s world. He made the bold decision. It’s a tricky question, because I don’t want to foreshadow anything that’s coming. Because it has to do with the writing. It has to do with Taylor’s choice to not only deal with this episode, but the entire season,” she explained. 

Costner chose to move forward with his Horizon: An American Saga film, which bombed at the box office in June, instead of returning to the Yellowstone set. He blamed it on the hit show’s constantly changing production schedule. “Well, I haven’t felt good about it the last year, what with the way they’ve talked about it. It wasn’t truthful. So now I’m talking about a little bit about what the real truth of it was. I made a contract for seasons five, six, and seven. In February, after a two- or three-month negotiation, they made another contract,” he told Deadline in May. “They wanted to redo that one, and instead of seasons six and seven, it was 5A and 5B, and maybe we’ll do six. They weren’t able to make those.”

The dispute between Costner and Sheridan reportedly carried over to the tight-knit cast, who reportedly had opposing views on the situation. “They’re caught between a rock and a hard place because they want to stay in Taylor Sheridan’s good graces, but some of them do really miss Kevin and feel like it was a huge mistake not figuring out a compromise,” a source shared with Life & Style in September. 

Sheridan told The Hollywood Reporter in June 2023 that he was “disappointed” that Costner did not return to the show, but he handled his star’s exit rather gracefully… at least in public. “My opinion of Kevin as an actor hasn’t altered… His creation of John Dutton is symbolic and powerful … and I’ve never had an issue with Kevin that he and I couldn’t work out on the phone. But once lawyers get involved, then people don’t get to talk to each other and start saying things that aren’t true and attempt to shift blame based on how the press or public seem to be reacting. He took a lot of this on the chin, and I don’t know that anyone deserves it.”

It does seem that the feud might have influenced Sheridan’s choices because he made sure Costner’s John Dutton was far off the landscape the moment the season started.

Before you go, click here to see celebrity co-stars who allegedly hated each other in real life.