The Netflix Number One Show With Perfect Review Scores That Only Cost $41.5 Million

Blockbuster streaming shows usually don’t come cheap. Amazon spent more than $800 million on two seasons of The Rings of Power while Star Wars spinoff Andor has cost Disney more than $645 million. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The tide began to turn during the pandemic when one-time box office darling Marvel abruptly fell out of favor. It signalled that audiences have grown increasingly tired of computer-generated action sequences featuring A List actors and instead yearn for the tight twisting plots which typified the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). It doesn’t take a hulking budget to make them.

The MCU was built on the simple but groundbreaking premise that it was set in the real world so it dispensed with the secret identities and gaudy costumes that were previously staples of super hero movies. However, as it surged in popularity, it attracted more expensive actors and its budgets ballooned.

It gave the film makers more creative freedom and they used it to create increasingly fantastical settings. The real world was no longer enough for recent MCU movies so they have been set in microscopic environments on earth and in alternate dimensions filled with floating dragons which are meant to be hidden behind actual waterfalls.

They have strayed so far from the original premise that not only has it alienated many viewers but it has also opened the door for other studios to revisit the formula that made the MCU such a success in the first place. There is still a great deal of life left in it as Netflix has demonstrated.

In June last year the streamer released Supacell, a six-part series set far from the lavish locations of recent MCU movies. It takes place on the gritty streets of modern-day South London and follows a group of five ordinary Black people, unified by family history of sickle cell disease. They unexpectedly develop superpowers and are pursued by a secret organisation which intends to control them.

The show prioritized plot over effects and starred little-known actors including Tosin Cole, Adelayo Adedayo and Josh Tedeku. It was just what audiences wanted as Supacell soared to number one on the list of the most-watched Netflix shows in its first full week of streaming with 11.8 million views. Critics lapped it up too leading to the show getting a 100% score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Indeed it was so well-received that just a few weeks after its debut it was renewed for a second season. Cost was the clincher.

Budgets of streaming shows are usually a closely-guarded secret as studios tend to absorb the costs of individual pictures in their overall expenses and don’t itemize how much was spent on each one. Netflix didn’t respond to an opportunity to comment for this report and it didn’t need to because the amount it spent on Supacell is laid bare in its own filings.

Its unglamorous setting in London doesn’t just make it more realistic but also shines a spotlight on its spending. Studios shoot in the United Kingdom to benefit from its government’s Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit (AVEC) which gives them a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country.

To qualify for the reimbursement, at least 10% of the production costs need to relate to activities in the U.K. In order to demonstrate this to the government, studios set up a separate production company in the U.K. for each show they make there. The companies have to file financial statements which reveal everything from the headcount and salaries to the total costs and the level of reimbursement. It takes a bit of detective work to get the information.

The companies usually have code names so that they don’t raise attention with fans when filing permits to film on location. Tallying the company names with the productions they are responsible for requires deep industry knowledge which my colleague and I have built up over nearly 15 years.

We are the only reporters worldwide who specialize in covering the financial statements of U.K. film production companies for national media and we have reported on them for more than 10 leading titles including The Times of London, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and the London Evening Standard.

The financial statements have a public interest in the U.K. media as the reimbursement to the studios comes from taxpayers’ money. Outside the U.K. the interest is in the bigger picture.

The Netflix subsidiary behind Supacell is called Midtown Productions and it recently released its latest filings which lift the curtain on how much it cost to make.

As with all U.K. companies, the financial statements are released in stages long after the period they relate to which explains why Midtown Productions’ latest filings are for the year to December 31, 2023. That was eight months after Supacell wrapped filming so the filings give an almost-complete picture of the spending on it.

They show that its costs came to just $41.5 million (£33.8 million) with one of the biggest single expenses being the $4.4 million (£3.6 million) spent on staff which peaked in 2022 at an average of 35 weekly full-time employees.

The show even banked a $10.5 million (£8.5 million) reimbursement bringing Netflix’s net spending on it down to just $31 million. It was money well-spent for both Netflix and the U.K. government.

The latest data from the British Film Institute (BFI) shows that in 2019, every $1.31 (£1) of reimbursement handed to studios generated $10.88 (£8.30) of additional Gross Value Added (GVA) benefit for the U.K. economy. It led to a total of $10.1 billion (£7.7 billion) in GVA being generated by the fiscal incentives for film in 2019.

Released in December 2021, the BFI’s triennial Screen Business report showed that between 2017 and 2019, the fiscal incentives to studios generated a record $17.7 billion (£13.5 billion) of return on investment to the UK economy and created more jobs than ever before. Filming in the U.K. doesn’t just generate jobs for locals, it also drives spending on services such as security, equipment hire, transport and catering.

In 2019, this spend generated 37,685 jobs in London and 7,775 throughout the rest of the U.K. The report added that when the wider impacts of the film content value chain are taken into consideration, 49,845 jobs were created in London in 2019 and 19,085 throughout the rest of the U.K.

Despite Hollywood being gripped by strikes for more than six months last year, the U.K. economy still got a magic touch from the fiscal incentives. Foreign studios contributed around 77% of the $1.8 billion (£1.4 billion) spent on making films in the U.K. in 2023 according to the BFI. Netflix is one of the biggest spenders and between 2020 and 2023 alone it invested almost $6 billion in the U.K. shooting shows and films.

It has paid off as over that time the streamer has made a massive $17.8 billion of net income. If all of its shows had been as cost-effective as Supacell, it might have been even higher.