On-set brawls. Courtroom battles. Epic bombs. Why the world’s most bankable cowboy is suddenly shooting blanks.

They were filming on a soundstage in Utah — Kevin Costner, Wes Bentley and Kelly Reilly — playing out another tense exchange in the Dutton family drama Yellowstone.

 

 

But between takes, tensions boiled over. Costner, both star and executive producer, was pushing Bentley to ditch Taylor Sheridan’s script and play the moment his way. Bentley refused. He told Costner that he had signed up for a Taylor Sheridan show, not a Kevin Costner production.

 

 

“Kevin didn’t like that, and he lunged at him,” says a source who was present. “No fists were thrown, but they were in each other’s faces, pushing and shoving and just getting hot until they had to be separated.” Reilly, according to one witness, was in tears. Production briefly shut down.

 

 

The dust-up — previously unreported — was a tipping point on a set already cracking from creative power struggles and bruised egos. But for Costner, it was merely the latest unfortunate incident in a long series of unfortunate incidents, a career marked by feuds, walkouts, lawsuits, financing fiascos and a growing reputation for being, as one former colleague put it, “impossible.”

 

 

There’s a long list of people in Hollywood who swear they’ll never work with Costner again. And they all have their reasons. He doesn’t always pay his bills on time — one since-settled lawsuit alleged hundreds of thousands in unpaid costume fees. He burns through relationships — like his longtime producing partner, whom he sued for $15 million. He ignores advice, even from folks like Steven Spielberg. He rewrites scripts without warning, overrules directors and on more than one occasion has clashed with his co-stars — including Clint Eastwood, Kurt Russell … and Wes Bentley.

All of which raises an obvious question, the one being whispered all across Hollywood right now, even among former allies: What’s going on with Kevin Costner?

The 70-year-old star has always swung for the fences — often literally, in pastoral baseball idylls like Bull Durham and Field of Dreams — with bold, risky choices. And Hollywood has counted him out before, only to be surprised by the resilience of his star power. But now, in the twilight of his career, the comebacks are getting harder to come by. The Oscar-winning director and actor with the most iconic American screen presence since Gary Cooper — the guy responsible for the line, “If you build it, they will come,” who once carried box office megahits like The Bodyguard — is now brawling with his castmates, getting sued by his crewmembers and, in recent months, giving paid keynote speeches at bakery and veterinarian conventions. And behind it all, according to several insiders, are power struggles playing out far from the spotlight — ones that some say have left even Costner himself in the dark.

“It’s sad, and that’s the only thing I can think of,” says a source who’s worked with Costner for over a decade. “I think he got lost in the ether and to this day, I just don’t get it.”

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Dances With Wolves had all the makings of an epic disaster. For starters, it was a Western, considered box office poison at the time. But there were also budget overruns, dangerous working conditions and a first-time director in Costner — also producing and starring in the film — who seemed entirely over his head. Before it was released in 1990, Hollywood wags were dismissing it as “Kevin’s Gate,” a none-too-subtle nod to 1981’s Heaven’s Gate, one of the biggest bombs in box office history.

But, of course, the naysayers had it all wrong. After Costner cobbled together its $22 million budget without any major studio investment — Orion Pictures reportedly wrote a check for $11 million while Costner put in $2.5 million of his own money — Dances With Wolves became a decade-defining hit, grossing $424 million, ultimately going on to win seven Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay.

It was a cultural phenomenon that single-handedly revived Westerns as a genre and transformed Costner into one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars. Time magazine proclaimed him “The New American hero.” A year later, Rolling Stone put him on its cover under the headline: “An American Classic.”

Costner quickly capitalized on the moment, following up with a remarkable string of hits, starting with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which came out six months after Wolves and grossed $390 million, making it the third-highest-grossing film of that year. That was followed up by Oliver Stone’s historical drama JFK, which grossed $205 million on a $40 million budget. Then came The Bodyguard, which co-starred Whitney Houston, and which grossed $411 million worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing film of 1992. Suddenly, Costner was considered — alongside Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis — one of the biggest movie stars in the world.