Why Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2 Exit Won’t Change the Ending – SlashFilm

You may not see as much social media chatter about “Yellowstone” or even know someone who watches the show. But since it began airing on Paramount Network in 2018, Taylor Sheridan’s neo-western has become a bonafide megahit.

According to Nielson (via Variety), Season 5 was the most-watched entertainment program of the 2022-2023 TV season, averaging 11.6 million viewers per week. This made the first half of Season 5 the only non-sports offering to average more than 10 million viewers per week. So when Paramount decided to air the “Yellowstone” pilot — in which John Dutton’s eldest son, Lee Dutton, meets his fate — on CBS in 2023, 6.6 million viewers tuned in, half of whom had never seen it. the program before. This meant that “Yellowstone” gained a slew of new viewers as a result of its airing on a traditional network, further cementing the series’ position as a true TV juggernaut.

Who is watching this show? Parents, mainly. The series is aimed at older audiences, hence the lack of any major enthusiasm on social media and why younger audiences have probably never heard of Kevin Costner’s farm owner John Dutton and his struggles. Whatever the case, though, Costner himself has been a big part of the success of “Yellowstone,” which is why when it was confirmed that he would not be returning for the highly anticipated season 5B, parents everywhere wondered how on earth , the show would explain the sudden loss of Patriarch Dutton and the figure around whom his favorite series revolved.

However, it appears that series creator Taylor Sheridan never worried about this particular issue as he knew how the series would end before it even began.

The debacle surrounding Kevin Costner’s departure from “Yellowstone” was prolonged and utterly confusing. On one hand, you have the veteran star claiming that he wasn’t given any details or scripts regarding Season 5 B of the series, which made it difficult for him to pursue his passion project, the “Horizon: An American Saga” film series. On the other hand, you have Taylor Sheridan and Paramount claiming that Costner made planning for the second half of the season difficult due to his commitment to that very project. Needless to say, there is no love lost between the two sides, and Costner is unequivocally not part of what was initially touted as the final episodes of “Yellowstone.” It has since been reported that Beth Dutton actor Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser, who plays ranch foreman Rip Wheeler, are in talks to star in a potential sixth season, which will be a very different show without Costner’s John Dutton at the center.

Meanwhile, “Yellowstone” went to great lengths to ensure that none of the cast or crew knew how Season 5B would end, distributing redacted scripts and generally making it very difficult for anyone involved to leak information to the press. But for Reilly, who has been with the series since its first season, most of those efforts have been in vain because, as she revealed to Entertainment Weekly in September 2024, “[Sheridan] counted [her] the series finale when we were filming the first season.” That claim was backed up by executive producer David Glasser, who told the outlet: “On day one, episode one, Taylor said, ‘I know exactly how this ends.’

Now, Reilly has spoken more about how this ending was affected by Costner’s departure. It turns out that the star’s controversial departure didn’t change Sheridan’s plans much. Speaking to EW, Reilly said John Dutton’s absence “was part of the ending” from the beginning. She continued: “This isn’t something we had to pivot, it was already written into the plot of the story. It was always going to happen, it just happened a little differently.”

Until now, the “Yellowstone” season 5B finale has been kept under wraps, even though it’s been almost two years since season 5A ended in January 2023. All we’ve had to go on since then are cast rumors, with Wes Bentley hinting at Jamie Dutton’s fate and Kelly Reilly remaining equally enigmatic about how Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler’s stories end. But by far the biggest mystery of all is how these final episodes will deal with John Dutton himself – especially after Kevin Costner dropped out.

According to Reilly, however, this challenge was made a little easier by the fact that Taylor Sheridan always envisioned her show lasting five seasons. “It would always be five seasons in [Sheridan’s] head,” the actor told EW. “But as the show became a success, the network and everyone wanted more. So, in a way, fate took over and we ended that part of ‘Yellowstone’ in a way that he always imagined it would end.”

How Sheridan got his original ending to the Costner-less series remains to be seen, but one thing you can be sure of is that parents everywhere will be tuning in to find out when Season 5 of “Yellowstone” finally premieres. on November 10, 2024.