Yellowstone Cast Salaries Are Outrageous Considering Show’s Degrading Quality
With how much Yellowstone has lost in terms of its quality over time, the cast salaries don’t make too much sense: they’re now larger than at the show’s peak.
Throughout the years, Taylor Sheridan ’s neo-Western series Yellowstone has been having a great run. A TV show phenomenon, Yellowstone was raking up sensational rating numbers that convinced execs to keep pumping money into Sheridan’s project… Until one day, it became clear that Yellowstone’s been killing itself.
As time went by, fans were becoming more and more vocal about the show’s degrading quality, and storylines were becoming less coherent by the season — and still, Yellowstone was better than most other shows. Then, the grand scandal came, and Sheridan’s most valued project started falling apart before our very eyes.
To this day, we’re not quite sure how Sheridan intends to wrap up the second half of Yellowstone’s apparently last season without his lead star Kevin Costner. Without John Dutton, there can be no Yellowstone — but even with him, fans were already quite frustrated with the quality of the first half of this season.
Amid all this, learning the show’s cast’s salaries evokes contradicting emotions. On the one hand, good for them; on the other hand, how could they keep increasing as the show’s quality kept degrading? Why was Kevin Costner being paid so much as he was getting ready to ditch the show and take off on his own?
Even at the very start of Yellowstone, Costner was offered $500k per episode. This is an insane number considering there was no success to backup such an offer at that point — but it wasn’t the most the lead star got. Over time, Costner’s salary increased to a whopping $1.3M per episode in Season 5… which he ditched!
At the same time, the rest of the cast never saw similar sums: most of the other cast members were getting paid $200k at most with many of them getting even less.
But Kevin Costner’s case is truly jaw-dropping. As Yellowstone was growing weaker, his personal salary somehow increased until it was almost three times bigger than it was — and then, he just dropped the series which resulted in Yellowstone’s premature finale.
Source: Variety