'Yellowstone' season 5 finally has a return date. Here's what we know, and whether Kevin Costner will be back.

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Whether or not Costner will return as John Dutton is still up in the air. Kevin Costner as John Dutton in "Yellowstone" season five. Paramount Network It seems inconceivable that the final episodes won't feature Costner, given that he is the show's protagonist, but it appears that could be the case if a new contract is not negotiated. Last year, the 69-year-old actor revealed via court documents related to his recent divorce that he is "no longer under contract" for the drama and wasn't expecting to receive any further monetary compensation from the series apart from "back-end contractual participation rights." When he later took the stand at a child support hearing, the Oscar winner said that a "long, hard-fought negotiation" about breaking season five into two parts was behind his exit, as it clashed with plans for his four-part Western saga, "Horizon." At the time, he stated his intentions to take the show's producers to court over a pay dispute. More recently, Costner has changed tack. Speaking to Entertainment Tonight in April, he said he'd "love" to be able to return to the show to wrap things up for his character, but no decisions had yet been made. And in June, he said that he would still consider returning. "I've always felt that... It might be an interesting moment to come back and finish the mythology of this modern-day family," he told People. "And if that happens, I would step into it if I agreed with how it was being done." But the actor told People that "in the very end, I couldn't do it for more than I had already done." The Hollywood Reporter reported in June that Costner was still unattached to the new batch of episodes at the time they began filming in May.