Wild consequence of Kevin Costner’s show exit

Kevin Costner walked away from Yellowstone which had become one of the biggest projects of his career, and it’s hit him especially hard.

Kevin Costner walked away from one of the biggest projects of his career when he quit Yellowstone and sparked a wave of backlash from fans of the show.

Costner first broke news of his decision to quit back in June in a video he shared on Instagram.

It came following a fallout with show creator Taylor Sheridan, and amid a contract dispute with Paramount.

At the time, Costner was earning a whopping $1.3 million (AUD 1.9m) per episode of Yellowstone. 

As a result, if he had signed on for both parts of season five, Costner would have earned around $24 million (AUD 36.8m).

Kevin Costner has lost out on a huge amount of money by not signing up to the latest series of Yellowstone. Photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images.

Instead, Costner decided to walk away, in part due to his desire to work on his Horizon movie series which he had convinced himself would become a huge hit.

Sadly for Costner, the first movie in the series became one of the biggest financial flops of the decade, and as result, the second movie has been indefinitely delayed despite being complete.

According to ET, Costner’s earnings as a result have dropped to $468,136 (AUD 717,900) a month, an amount discovered in court filings during his divorce from Christine Baumgartner.

To make matters worse, Costner invested a whopping $38 million (AUD 58.3) into his Horizon movies, a sum he will likely never get back.

In the first episode of the second half of Season 5, it was revealed that John Dutton was killed after a mysterious fatal gunshot wound in the bathroom of the Montana governor’s mansion. It appears that Costner wasn’t on set to film the scene, because while his character’s bloodied corpse is shown, the camera never cuts to his face.

Costner spent the summer promoting his new movie, Horizon, but it failed to make an impact at the box office. Photo: Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SCAD.

Hours after the scene aired around the world, including on Stan where it airs in Australia, Costner was asked about his feelings about his character’s fate during a radio interview.

“That’s a swear to God moment. I swear to God. I mean, I’ve been seeing ads with my face all over the place and I’m thinking, ‘Gee, I’m not in that one’.” Costner said in an interview with SiriusXM’s The Michael Smerconish Program on Monday morning.

“I’m not in this season. But I didn’t realise yesterday was the thing. Somebody said, ‘It played last night?’ And I said, ‘Hmm, okay.’ So no, I found out about it this morning actually.”

“I didn’t see it. I heard it’s a suicide. That doesn’t make me wanna rush to go see it,” he continued. “They’re pretty smart people. Maybe it’s a red herring. They’re very good. They’ll figure that out.’”

Costner said that earlier in the series’ run, there were “a couple times where I talked about possible endings for myself,” which did not include suicide. But he added that how the Yellowstone writers wrote Dutton out of the story is “their business.”