Yellowstone Season 6 Is Dead, Here’s Why

As is true for a majority of disputes in Hollywood, Kevin Costner’s departure from Yellowstone, which led to the fall of Season 6, came down to money and time. With so many big names working on the series, each with their own stacked docket of other projects, Costner wasn’t the only one balancing a tight schedule.

This led to Sheridan and the rest of the upper brass moving to break Season 5 into two parts, which would seemingly be the first strike for Costner as it gave him less time to work on his project, Horizon: An American Saga.

Serving Horizon as the director, writer, producer, and star, Kevin Costner didn’t have a lot of time to play around with when it came to filming for Season 5 of Yellowstone, requesting that his screen time be cut down exponentially.

Unfortunately for him, his role as the main family’s patriarch is the crux of the show, meaning that Sheridan and the rest of the team couldn’t stand to lose any piece of his storyline. Between this and a financial disagreement that came during talks for Yellowstone’s Season 6, Costner chose to step down from the series, putting Sheridan and the others between a rock and a hard place.

On one hand, even without Kevin Costner’s John Dutton, Yellowstone could have gone forward with Season 6. After all, there are plenty of other intriguing characters to form bigger plotlines around, and, having something major happen to John Dutton would’ve been a fun and startling direction to take the story.

However, it’s likely that by the time filming was able to begin on part two of Season 5, Sheridan was ready to put the final nail in Yellowstone’s casket – especially with all the spin-offs that have either already aired or are in the works. 

Of those shows that will replace Yellowstone Season 6 to continue the production’s legacy are the second season of the critically acclaimed 1923 starring Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford, with the separate prequel, 1944, and the newly announced 2024 also on the way with the latter set to star Matthew McConaughey. The most recent spin-off to arrive from the Yellowstone universe is an off-shoot of the first prequel, 1883. Titled Lawmen: Bass Reeves, the first season of the show followed the titular legendary U.S. Marshal during his impressive career out West.

As for those Kevin Costner fans who are sad to be missing him and the rest of the Dutton family in Yellowstone Season 6, Horizon: An American Saga will be broken into two different parts with the first set to arrive in June 2024 and the second two months later in August 2024.