The end of the road may be a tad further off than expected for the Paramount Network series.
Yellowstone may be drawing to an end — but there’s still plenty of time for more drama behind the scenes of the Paramount Network show.
Consider this: According to Matthew Belloni of the Puck news site, no one at Paramount gave series star Kevin Costner a head’s up before the Friday announcement that the phenomenally popular drama is ending later this year. Which should give you some idea how relations between the Oscar-winner and the network have deteriorated during the ongoing squabble over how much time Costner wants to devote to the remaining Season 5 episodes.
According to Belloni, “Over the past couple months, various Costner scenarios have been floated, per sources close to the production. Paramount’s Chris McCarthy and Yellowstone producer David Glasser suggested anywhere from 30 days to 45 days of shooting; Costner’s team has countered with a range from one week to three weeks, with the latest interactions suggesting the lower end of that timeline. Paramount has been waiting a while for Costner’s lawyer, Howard Kaplan, to provide a final answer on what Costner is willing to do, so McCarthy just decided to announce the end date for the episodes, the first few of which have been written with flexibility to allow for various levels of Costner involvement (or non-involvement). Remember, this show was supposed to air its 5B season in June.
“Given how long Costner has jerked around the show’s creatives and executives,” Belloni added, “I’d probably do the same.”
Costner currently is busy in Utah filming his epic Western Horizon: An American Saga, which he is directing from a script he co-wrote with John Baird, and that appears to be his main priority right now. Still, there remains the possibility that he would return just long enough for John Dutton to ride off into the sunset, one way or another.
Maybe.
Belloni claims he has heard from reliable sources that Costner, who reportedly is earning $1.2 million per episode this season, “won’t commit to returning until he finds out and is comfortable with how his John Dutton character is written out of the franchise. Costner is pretty savvy, and he wants to prevent what Shonda Rhimes did to Patrick Dempsey, killing off the race car-driving Grey’s Anatomy star in an F-you car accident. So [Yellowstone executive producer and co-creator Taylor Sheridan] may not be able to dispose of his Western-loving leading man via a kick from an angry horse.”
Of course, the WGA strike may cause additional delays for Yellowstone. The original game plan called for the “final cycle” of episodes to kick off in November, followed by the premiere of a Yellowstone sequel (starring, perhaps, Matthew McConaughey) in December. Filming for the second half of Yellowstone’s Season 5 had been scheduled for summer and fall. But until the WGA work stoppage ends, there presumably can be no rewrites of any scripts that had been completed before the strike started last week. So if Sheridan really does have to revise his scripts to send John Dutton packing in a way acceptable to Costner…
Hey, who knows? Maybe by the time the strike ends, Horizon will have wrapped, and Costner will be free for as much time as Sheridan needs to properly end Yellowstone.
We can dream, can’t we?
