For fans, the entertainment industry is about creating art, but for the people who make the TV shows and movies, it’s also a business... a very expensive business. We spend a lot of time talking about how much movies cost and how much they make at the box office, but in the modern landscape, TV can be even more expensive, as Andor has recently proven.
Andor is generally agreed by even the most critical fans to be one of the better additions to the world of Star Wars since Disney took over the franchise. Having said that, making a show that good certainly wasn’t cheap, and I’m still losing my mind over what Andor actually cost.
What Andor Cost
Budgets are not something that studios really tend to reveal. It’s often left to rumors or simply estimating the math to figure it all out. However, speaking at the ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas, Andor creator Tony Gilroy revealed (via Deadline) a real number, pegging the cost of both seasons of Andor at $650 million.
That’s about right, as estimates for Season 2 of Andor had been pegged at about $300 million. That’s slightly more than what Deadline estimates Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker's budget, so each season basically cost as much as a movie.
A movie like Rise of Skywalker with a budget like that is basically required to make $1 billion at the global box office to start making money, which is wild enough. With the economics of streaming being far more complicated, even to the studios, it’s kind of insane that Disney greenlit that amount of money.
How Tony Gilroy Felt About Andor’s Budget
To be sure, Tony Gilroy understood what came along with all that money. He admitted that he made his decisions about what to do with the show carefully, knowing that he had a lot of somebody else’s money on the line. This included one of the most well-known changes from Andor's first season. Gilroy said…
I mean, [for] Disney this is $650 million. For 24 episodes, I never took a note. We said ‘F-ck the Empire’ in the first season, and they said, ‘Can you please not do that?’…
The showrunner has spoken openly about the fact that the line “Fuck the Empire” was previously in a script near the end of Season 1, but that Disney executives asked that the line be changed. It seems that at least part of the reason he was willing to do that was because he understood who had money on the line.
We have very specific details about just how important those budgets are. We know that the cancellation of The Acolyte, another Disney+ Star Wars series, had as much to do with what it cost to make than whether or not people were actually watching.
Gilroy said there were actually conflicts over the money during Andor Season 2, as there were indications that Disney+ wanted to spend less on Season 2 of the show. While Gilroy indicates he “fought hard” to make sure the show got what he needed, it doesn’t sound like there were ever any real fights about what things cost, which the showrunner appreciated. He continued…
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 comes with responsibilities.
Gilroy has been open about that he doesn't love the way streaming has changed the industry. Considering how little we know about the way streaming series work, it’s likely we’ll never really know whether Disney’s $650 million investment in Andor was worth it to the studio. If nothing else, it seems like it was worth it to the fans, which probably meant a lot of Disney+ subscription money.
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