Kevin Costner Left Out Of Yellowstone Announcement And Fans Are Going Nuts
Kevin Costner was not included with the rest of the cast in a recent Yellowstone Instagram promotional post.
A new Instagram post has Kevin Costner and Yellowstone fans in a tizzy. The Western show’s account announced that they are releasing a line of merchandise featuring quotes and characters from the Yellowstone series, and even a line of cardboard cutouts with fan-favorite characters on them. The only problem? The one character that brings the most attention to the show is not there.
There are cutouts of some of the show’s other important actors/characters like Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton and Luke Grimes’ Kaycee Dutton, but Kevin Costner’s John Dutton character does not appear in the Yellowstone merch announcement at all. Does this mean he’s leaving the series?
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. No one has any idea. In spite of Kevin Costner winning numerous awards for his work on Yellowstone, there have been non-stop rumors for months that he is leaving the show or that the show itself is ending. Some say he can’t get along with the network and the team, but others say he wants to focus his time on an epic new Western series he has been working on.
So, it might mean that he is leaving the show… or it might just mean that there are limits to what can be done with Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone character’s likeness. It is possible that his contract stipulates that images of him can’t be used for this purpose, which would explain why there is no cardboard cutout of the main character of the show.
This theory makes sense, too, if you look at Paramount’s Yellowstone store page, on which you can find (with some scrolling) a t-shirt with a famous quote by Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone character: “Go ruin someone else’s day.”
So, does that explain the mystery of why Kevin Costner’s face isn’t on any of Yellowstone’s merchandise? Apparently not according to fans. The comments on the Instagram post are full of people asking “Where is Kevin Costner?!” and claiming that they are “Not here for this without him.”
Others are adamant that, logical explanations aside, this means that Kevin Costner’s time with Yellowstone is coming to an end. Which, as we already mentioned, is always theoretically possible, especially seeing as Kevin Costner never expected the show to last this long.
When Kevin Costner signed up to do Yellowstone, it was pitched as a limited series. It was only supposed to have lasted one season, but its popularity has led Paramount to renew it again and again. It is always a possibility that Kevin Costner would want to leave to try out other projects, but we don’t think that has anything to do with this line of merchandise.
Even if Kevin Costner were to quit Yellowstone soon, it is likely that there still would have been merchandise with his likeness in the collection if it were possible to produce it. He is the face of the show and has been a part of it since the beginning, so it wouldn’t make sense not to include him in the merch if there weren’t something contractual preventing it. But, as they say out West, that’s just our two cents.
