Kevin Costner Confirms He Will Not Be Returning to ‘Yellowstone’: “I Just Realized That I’m Not Going to Be Able to Continue”

It’s official: Kevin Costner will not be returning to Yellowstone.

The actor posted a video to social media Thursday in which he confirmed long-mooted speculation that he was done with Paramount+’s monster neo-Western drama Yellowstone.

“I just want to reach out and let you know that after this long year and a half of working on Horizon and doing all the things that that’s required,” Costner said at the start of the clip, referring to the Western film series Horizon: An American Saga he has been working on, “and thinking about Yellowstone, that beloved series that I love, that I know you love. I just realized that I’m not going to be able to continue, season five or into the future.”

Regarding Yellowstone, Costner said the show “was something that really changed me.”

“I loved it and I know you loved it, and I just wanted to let you know that I won’t be returning,” he continued. “I love the relationship we’ve been able to develop, and I’ll see you at the movies.”

The second half of season five of Yellowstone will return Nov. 10, although an episode count has yet to be announced. There remained lingering hopes that Costner, who played patriarch John Dutton in the Taylor Sheridan-created show, would return, although it was extremely unlikely he would have featured in season five as those episodes are already filming and Costner has been busy with Horizon.

Yet Costner, in recent weeks, has been repeatedly making statements to the press about wanting to rejoin the project — but only if he likes his character’s final arc.

“I loved the show,” Costner told People magazine this week. “I liked the people on the show. I liked what it was about. I love that world…I’ve always felt that…it might be an interesting moment to come back and finish the mythology of this modern-day family. And if that happens, I would step into it if I agreed with how it was being done.”

Much of Costner’s creative energies, and his own personal finances, have been tied up with the independently financed Horizon, an expansive and ambitious series of Western films that he will direct, star in, co-write and produce.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker has mapped out a four-movie series, with Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 hitting theatersJune 28. The first Horizon film cost $100 million to make before marketing but was tracking to open to $12 million earlier this month. Chapter 1 premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where a tearful Costner witnessed the film receive a four-and-a-half-minute standing ovation.

Horizon is a passion project for Costner, who put $38 million of his own wealth into the project to pursue his own vision of the West. A large chunk of the budget was financed through foreign sales, whereby rights are sold off territory by territory.

Chapter 2 follows quickly, and is set to open in theaters Aug. 16 this year. The third and fourth chapters are currently undated, but Costner revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that he has filmed some of Chapter 3, but needs more funds to complete his vision.

“I don’t want to let this pile of things I have — whether it’s money, whether it’s [possessions] — be so important to me that I can’t think about what I want to do,” Costner told THR‘s Scott Feinberg at Cannes, explaining why he put his own money into the movie. “I’m going to keep enough things that my family’s going to be good.… I’d like to have money, I’d like to have nice things, but I thought to myself, ‘That’s going to control me if I let it.’”