So yes, Deadline broke the news that Kevin Costner will not make it past part of “Yellowstone,” season 5, which we should see this summer.
I’m told that there is no love lost between “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan and Costner.
“The people there hate him,” my source says. “They hate each other. He’s very demanding. He’s impossible.”
The big stumbling points aren’t just time, as described in Deadline. “It’s all about money,” my source says. “Kevin wants more of it, he’s very bad with money.”
Indeed, a posting went up in the last two weeks that Costner is renting his sprawling Aspen, Colorado ranch for — drum roll, please — $36,000 a night. Even though he’s made a lot of money from “Yellowstone,” let’s not forget Costner has seven children and who knows how many people on his payroll.
None of this, as a friend of mine used to say, makes him a bad person. But I’m told Paramount is over the whole thing. This makes sense, too, because when Costner first announced his “Horizon” project, I wrote here that Paramount would scoop it up in order to stay in business with their “Yellowstone” star.
And then, surprise! Costner made his deal with New Line/Warner Bros. “Horizon” has turned into an 11 hour massive project for him, too, ballooning in cost and scope. Sound familiar? That was the same thing with “Waterworld” and “The Postman,” which were notorious bombs.
It would be easy to write Costner aka John Dutton out of “Yellowstone” and introduce Matthew McConaughey as a new central character. There have also been clues dropped in the press that Dutton’s days are numbered. If his character met a demise, it would not affect any of the prequels about the Dutton family, either.
Meantime, Costner gave an eloquent, beautiful speech this past Saturday night honoring Clive Davis and remembering Whitney Houston at Davis’s pre-Grammy gala. As time goes by, Costner’s devotion to Houston, his “Bodyguard” co-star, has grown and grown.
