The second and final season of Star Wars: Andor wrapped up last month, bringing an end to what many consider to be the best piece of Star Wars media to have come out of Lucasfilm in years. Originally, showrunner Tony Gilroy had five seasons of story planned out for the show, but it ended up getting reduced to two. Those two still got the job done, but you have to wonder why things got cut down so significantly.
The answer comes into focus when you hear Gilroy, speaking at the ATX Television Festival, say that just those two seasons cost a staggering "$650 million" to produce. Even more impressive: Disney still mostly let Gilroy do whatever he wanted with the show. “For 24 episodes, I never took a note. We said ‘F*** the Empire’ in the first season, and they said, ‘Can you please not do that?’" he recalled (they ended up changing it to "Fight the Empire." And then, "In Season 2, they said, ‘Streaming is dead, we don’t have the money we had before,’ so we fought hard about money, but they never cleaned anything up. That [freedom] comes with responsibilities.”
Star Wars: Andor is a lovely-looking show, but I admit I was surprised to hear that it cost $650 million. At 24 episodes, that comes out to about $27 million per episode. It's a reminder of how far TV has come since even the 2010s, when an especially expensive episode of Game of Thrones, like the very impressive "Battle of the Bastards" cost only $11 million to produce. Even in its final season, after the show had become a pop culture phenomenon watched by huge masses of people, Game of Thrones only cost $15 million to make per episode, and that was considered very expensive.
Game of Thrones was a big success, so HBO probably saw a healthy return on that investment. But Andor, as good as it was, never pulled in the kinds of audiences Game of Thrones did at its peak, audiences that justified HBO's large expenditures. It was an experimental Star Wars show, and yet it was tremendously expensive from the jump.
At one point, streaming services like Disney+ may have still thought it worth throwing money at the show, back when they were all focused on subscriber growth at any cost. But then the pandemic happened, straining productions around the world. Then Hollywood writers and actors went on strike in 2023, applying further pressure. On the other side of those events, studios are focused on making sure their bottom lines don't get away from them. That's likey what Gilroy means when he relays that message from Disney: "In Season 2, they said, 'Streaming is dead, we don't have the money we had before.'"
You can see examples of this belt-tightening all over the industry, like with Amazon and Sony canceling their Wheel of Time TV show. And while I'm sad to see great shows like this bow out early (at least Andor got a proper ending), I understand the economics make it all but necessary. We're entering a new phase of the streaming wars, where networks will either have to stop making these elaborate genre shows or find a way to make them cheaper.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.
h/t Forbes