It’s official: “Yellowstone” will be wrapping up its fifth and final season later this year.
The series, co-created by Taylor Sheridan and John Linson, centers on John Dutton (Kevin Costner), an aging rancher who spends his life maintaining and protecting his family’s land and legacy in the face of myriad threats.
The first eight episodes of season five began airing on the Paramount Network in late 2022 before the cliffhanger midseason finale dropped on January 1, 2023.
Since then, fans of the series have been desperately waiting to find out what happens next — but the show has faced setback after setback.
First, reports of a falling out between Costner and Sheridan suggested the show would be coming to a premature end with what has aired so far because the two couldn’t agree on the shooting schedule for new episodes.
Paramount then announced “Yellowstone” would officially conclude with the second half of the fifth season, which was scheduled to air in the fall of 2023. However, the Hollywood writers’ strike that began in May and the actors’ strike in July delayed production further.
On May 20, Paramount announced that “Yellowstone” had begun filming in Montana. And on June 20, the network confirmed that the Dutton family saga will come to a close this year, with the final batch of episodes set to premiere on November 10.
Here’s everything we know about “Yellowstone” season 5, part 2 so far.
Whether or not Costner will return as John Dutton is still up in the air.
It seems inconceivable that the final episodes won’t feature Costner, given that he is the show’s protagonist, but it appears that could be the case if a new contract is not negotiated.
Last year, the 69-year-old actor revealed via court documents related to his recent divorce that he is “no longer under contract” for the drama and wasn’t expecting to receive any further monetary compensation from the series apart from “back-end contractual participation rights.”
When he later took the stand at a child support hearing, the Oscar winner said that a “long, hard-fought negotiation” about breaking season five into two parts was behind his exit, as it clashed with plans for his four-part Western saga, “Horizon.”
At the time, he stated his intentions to take the show’s producers to court over a pay dispute.
More recently, Costner has changed tack. Speaking to Entertainment Tonight in April, he said he’d “love” to be able to return to the show to wrap things up for his character, but no decisions had yet been made.
And in June, he said that he would still consider returning.
“I’ve always felt that… It might be an interesting moment to come back and finish the mythology of this modern-day family,” he told People. “And if that happens, I would step into it if I agreed with how it was being done.”
But the actor told People that “in the very end, I couldn’t do it for more than I had already done.”
The Hollywood Reporter reported in June that Costner was still unattached to the new batch of episodes at the time they began filming in May.
The rest of the main cast are expected to return.
There may be a question mark hovering around Costner’s status on the show, but the rest of the cast will likely return.
That means audiences can expect to see John’s business-minded daughter Beth (Kelly Reilly), his adopted lawyer son Jamie (Wes Bentley), and the youngest and most wayward of the siblings, Kayce (Luke Grimes), all back at the ranch.
However, Reilly, Grimes, and Cole Hauser, who plays John’s right-hand man, have requested significant pay increases to return, per a report from Puck’s Matthew Belloni.
Paramount and 101 Studios are said to have pushed back on the proposed new salaries, which come close to the $1.3 million per episode Costner was paid during the first half of season five. No update has been given about their salary negotiations since February 2024.
Alongside them, there is also John’s new girlfriend, Summer (Piper Perabo), his daughter-in-law Monica (Kelsey Asbille), and his long-standing adversary, Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham).
Lastly, there’s the ragtag group of ranch hands who make the Dutton spread what it is: Lloyd (Forrie J. Smith), Ryan (Ian Bohen), Teeter (Jennifer Landon), and Walker (Ryan Bingham).
In a June 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the series cocreator hinted that the ending of “Yellowstone” will see Costner’s character killed off.
Sheridan said that the “Field of Dreams” star’s decision to leave the show “truncates the closure of his character,” but added that the character’s fate and the ending of the show had been planned since the early days of “Yellowstone.”
Even before it was revealed that Costner has a “moral death” clause in his “Yellowstone” contract that prevents his character from dying in a way that would be embarrassing, Sheridan made it clear that John wouldn’t be meeting his maker in that particular way.
Sheridan said audiences won’t see John die in a conveniently timed car crash, like Patrick Dempsey’s character on “Grey’s Anatomy,” or his own on “Sons of Anarchy.”
“I don’t do fuck-you car crashes,” the “Wind River” director said of the technique often employed by writers as a way to kill off characters amid behind-the-scenes tension.
However, there’s now a question of whether John’s death will have to occur off-screen if Costner does not return to film scenes.
