Yellowstone drops deliberately confounding trailer for Kevin Costner-free final episodes

With shoot-outs, land grabs and family members threatening to kill each other, there are plenty of onscreen dramas in Yellowstone. All that propulsive action is why the series is so popular in the US and in Australia.

Who needs nuance and realistic characters when there are cowboys and cowgirls puffing their chests? Yellowstone has always been steeped in an imagined lawlessness of mythical frontier times when Americans were still AMERICANS. Whatever that means depends on who you ask.

Yellowstone returns on November 11 with the second half of its much-delayed fifth season but anyone who might have missed the off-screen scenes of the past 18 months may not realise Kevin Costner is out.

That’s certainly not what the latest trailer dropped today suggests. In a confounding move, the one-minute-17-second clip opens with Costner’s voiceover ominously intoning, “Everyone’s forgotten who runs this valley, time to remind them,” while cutting through a montage of key characters and ending on Costner’s face.

The trailer also ends with Costner’s John Dutton, as he teased, “This war is just beginning”.

Let’s be clear. There has been no change of heart, no détente between combatants – Costner is not in this season of Yellowstone, even if he is peppered throughout this trailer.

But marketing people will always be marketing people, that is to say, a little bendy with the truth.

Costner’s ultra-masculine and murderous patriarch has been to key to Yellowstone’s commercial success so going forward without him is a little dicey. Best not to announce it to the audiences who haven’t been paying attention to the battle royale between Costner and creator/showrunner Tyler Sheridan.

With the next – and likely final – batch of episodes two-and-a-half weeks away the show is still quiet on future storylines but it looks to revolve around, what else, control and power.

When the most recent episodes aired almost two years ago, Jamie (Wes Bentley) had just challenged his father John and sister Beth (Kelly Reilly). War seemed inevitable, and around those parts, they don’t just play around with board seats or lawsuits. These people have way too many guns and a propensity to use them.

But rather than wrapping that storyline up as it was meant to, Yellowstone had to change course when Costner and Sheridan became foes.

Instead of going back into production in March 2023, filming was halted. Two months later, it was announced the series would resume production but that the back half of season five will now be the final episodes – despite being one of the most popular scripted series on American TV.

The Costner and Sheridan spat has played out behind the scenes and in public and relates primarily to filming schedules.

The studio/Sheridan side blamed Costner for being too demanding with how little he wanted to work so he could make his passion project, the four-movie Horizon, which has since tanked when the first film opened to a negligible box office and withering reviews.

Costner kept quiet until this year, except for one reference during his divorce proceedings when he threatened to sue the producers for breach of contract, and revealed in an interview that he held Sheridan responsible for the schism.

The actor argued that he wasn’t returning to the show because scripts weren’t ready at the agreed-upon times, and he could no longer accommodate the shifting schedules.

The two parties parted ways and Yellowstone season five part two officially went back into production without Costner. How that resolves in the narrative is a mystery.

But that wasn’t the end of the drama. When it was announced the show would end with season five, the show already had two spin-offs, prequels 1883 and 1923, both of which performed well.

There were also rumours of another sequel/spin-off that would continue the current timeline of Yellowstone but with a new lead star.

Originally, the speculation was that Matthew McConaughey was being courted to front the project and other Yellowstone actors such as Reilly and Cole Hauser would join.

That has yet to eventuate and may very well have morphed into The Madison, a spin-off to be led by Michelle Pfeiffer and Matthew Fox, but there are no signs of Yellowstone onscreen alums attached.

To gummy up the works, industry newsletter Puck reported there may be talks to continue the main Yellowstone series into a sixth season and that the protracted negotiations with Reilly and Hauser were for that and not a sequel series.

But there is another reason why the studio, Paramount, will want to shut the main series down for good and continue on with its spin-offs. Paramount does not have the first-run streaming rights to Yellowstone in the US or in Australia, which it sold to Peacock and Stan respectively, deals done before it launched its own streamer, Paramount+.

That means its most popular series is hosted on rival platforms instead of its own, where it does have the rights to all the spin-offs. If Yellowstone does end, then it can lure all those audiences to Paramount+, soon to be the only home of everything in the Yellowstone universe.