Kevin Costner Makes A Ridiculous Amount Of Money For Each Yellowstone Episode
It appears that Kevin Costner is making a ridiculous amount of money for playing John Dutton on Paramount's hit Yellowstone.
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Look, when you are the star of one of the biggest shows on television right now, then it stands to reason you will be getting paid a handsome sum of cash. In that respect, the accounting isn’t too terribly difficult and it leaves the face of the show with considerable negotiating leverage. Kevin Costner understands this as much as anyone and is heading to the bank when it comes to his hit show Yellowstone. According to Puck (via ScreenRant) Costner has seen his salary grow on the series and is now pulling in $1.2 million dollars per episode over the course of this last season. Some pretty easy back-of-the-napkin math put his salary at $12 million for this last run of episodes. Not a bad little payday for John Dutton.
According to the reporting, this wasn’t always the case for Kevin Costner on Yellowstone, though he wasn’t exactly working for scraps when things started out either. Originally, the plan for the series was to have it simply be a miniseries worth of episodes and for that deal, Costner negotiated a price of $500,000 per airing. But as we know, the series has only grown in a pretty epic fashion and he had some escalation clauses in there while also renegotiating each year which has meant the price going up with each subsequent season.
And for his part, Kevin Costner definitely has a cowboy-booted leg to stand on when going to the negotiating table for his role in Yellowstone. The series has seen pretty insane growth in its four seasons on the Paramount Network and Paramount+. While the first years started with an average of about two million viewers per episode, it’s only gone up since. The second and third seasons saw moderate growth, but this last one, the fourth season is when it really started to hit the stratosphere. The series averaged almost eight million viewers over this last 10-episode run, easily making it the most-watched on the network. The season finale topped nine million which was the high-water mark for Paramount.
The Taylor Sheridan-created Yellowstone follows Kevin Costner as John Dutton, the owner of the largest contiguous ranch in Montana. While it would seem like, on the surface, this would be a show about cowboys, it’s turned out to be much more. Using the ranch as something of a backdrop, the series has shown how the Dutton family, by way of their land, is wrapped up in the political, social, environmental, and financial ecosystem of the area. It’s meant a wide-ranging storyline with plenty of intrigue. There is a reason fans have flocked to the series and why Costner is getting paid (with a capital “P”) for his services.
And the Kevin Costner-led series has now spawned a full-on franchise around this world. The recently-released 1883 explores the timeline detailing just how the Dutton family came to own this amount of land. It’s been another hit for the streamer and critically acclaimed to boot. Plus there are plans for 6666 which will exist in the Kevin Costner timeline but will take place at another ranch.
