Kevin Costner Divorce Hearing Reveals What Happened to 'Yellowstone' Season 6 and 7
Kevin Costner as John Dutton in "Yellowstone"
Kevin Costner revealed the real reason he walked away from Yellowstone in a divorce hearing on Friday.
Costner, 68, took the stand in his ongoing (and increasingly absurd) child support battle with estranged wife Christine Baumgartner, putting the spotlight on the Oscar winner's finances once again.
PEOPLE reports that Baumgartner, 49, is asking for more than $161,000 per month in child support for their three teenage kids, while Costner doesn't want to budge from the $129,000 per month that he's currently paying her. Costner's team proposed capping child support payments for sons Cayden Wyatt, 16, and Hayes Logan, 14, and daughter Grace Avery, 13, at $60,000 per month.
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According to The Daily Mail, Costner was lighthearted throughout most of the proceedings until the topic of his hit Paramount series came up, at which point he grew significantly more serious.
Costner reportedly told the court that he initially agreed to appear in Yellowstone Seasons 5, 6 and 7, negotiating a fee of $12 million for each season.
However, when Yellowstone Season 5 was cut into two half-seasons, 5A and 5B, Costner claimed it threw a wrench into his schedule for his Horizon movie series. He was ready to shoot Season 5B last fall, he claimed, and delayed production on Horizon for the effort, a move that cost him $10 million. Despite the accommodation, Costner said, Yellowstone never went into production for Season 5B because the scripts weren't ready.
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Despite the delays, Costner said he continued negotiating for his return for Season 6, asking for $12 million in February, then again in May, before Paramount ultimately cut off negotiations and walked away from any potential deal.
It was later announced that the series would end with the Season 5B finale, which still doesn't have an air date as of this writing (it was expected to drop sometime in November 2023, but that is unlikely at this point). The extent to which Costner will appear in 5B, if at all, has not been confirmed.
Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan previously said that while he was ultimately "disappointed" in Costner's untimely exit, he still respects the actor tremendously. He also claimed that Costner's ouster didn't change the character trajectory for John Dutton in the series.
"It truncates the closure of his character," Sheridan said. "It doesn't alter it, but it truncates it."
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In the context of the divorce hearing, Costner and his legal team, led by "disso queen" Laura Wasser, argued that his Yellowstone income should be considered past income, not future income, since he isn't returning to the show.
Costner also revealed he's expected to make $12 million for each of the first two films in his upcoming Horizon series. When questioned on the stand why he didn't take the $24 million he was owed yet, he said he didn't want to cut into the film's budgets.
"I would have liked to have it. I think anyone would but I did what I thought was right," he said of deferring his payments. When asked if he expects to turn a profit upon the movie's respective releases, he replied, "Boy, I'd like it to roll."
Costner is still at work on the third and fourth installments of Horizon, while a sequel series has been announced for Yellowstone following its conclusion after Season 5B.
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