How Much Is Kevin Costner Making For Yellowstone? His Salary Revealed
We found out how much Kevin Costner is being paid to star in Yellowstone and as you might guess: it's a lot.
This article is more than 2 years old
Kevin Costner had a major career resurgence when he signed onto a neo-Western show created by a guy who acted on Sons of Anarchy. Yellowstone became a ratings behemoth, quickly developing the kind of devoted fan base that most shows could only dream of. As one might expect, that kind of popularity has done wonders for Kevin Costner’s paygrade. According to a new report from Variety, Kevin Costner is receiving an astonishing $1.3 million for every new episode of Yellowstone. Given that the last three seasons of the show have ten episodes each, that is a pretty solid windfall for Kevin Costner.
That $1.3 million number actually ties Kevin Costner with fellow Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali for the highest paid actor on television. But while both are being paid $1.3 million per episode of their respective shows, Kevin Costner actually has a little bit of an edge. While the fourth season of Yellowstone had the aforementioned ten episodes, Mahershala Ali’s $1.3 million number comes courtesy of an upcoming show titled The Plot. The limited series is being produced by Disney’s Onyx Collective and will be streamed on Hulu; however, per IMDb, the series will only have eight episodes, putting Mahershala Ali a few million dollars below Kevin Costner at the end of the day. The Plot is based on a novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz and will follow Mahershala Ali as a struggling writer who commits literary fraud and finds himself in a tightening web of deceit.
Prior to starring in Yellowstone, Kevin Costner had not appeared on television since the History Channel miniseries Hatfields & McCoys in 2012. The series also starred the late Bill Paxton, Tom Berenger, and Powers Boothe and presumably primed Kevin Costner to return to the Western genre. While he has worked in genres as diverse as dystopian science fiction (Waterworld and The Postman), serial killer thrillers (Mr. Brooks), and sports dramas (a whole bunch of movies), Kevin Costner has been long associated with Westerns. It is no surprise that his return to the genre with Yellowstone has revitalized his career to the point that he is working on developing new projects in which he can wear cowboy hats.
While Yellowstone was almost instantly a huge popular success, it has taken a while for the Kevin Costner-led drama to gain critical respect. The show was completely shut out of the Primetime Emmys for 2022 in a move that was largely perceived as a snub. However, Paramount is eager to make as many spin-offs of the show as Taylor Sheridan can think of time periods and it has already led to a number of thematically similar shows starring movie stars like Sylvester Stallone’s Tulsa King and Billy Bob Thornton’s Land Man. We will have to check back next year to see whether they are getting paid anything close to Kevin Costner.
