The Star Wars Streaming Show With A Higher Budget Than The Films

When Disney launched its streaming platform in November 2019 it had Netflix in its sights. As the most well-known streaming service, Netflix was comfortably the market leader but Disney devised a magic formula to take its crown. Star Wars was at the heart of this grand plan and no expense was spared.

Disney’s first step was removing its content from Netflix so that it could be exclusive to its own streaming platform. It came at quite a cost. In February 2019 the Mouse forecast that the foregone licensing alone would lead to a loss of around $150 million of operating income during the year but this was just the start.

Part two of Disney’s grand plan to dethrone Netflix was to commission exclusive content which could only be found on its platform. It figured that the appeal of its franchises like Marvel and Star Wars would tempt subscribers to its Disney+ streaming platform and it went all out on this. In September 2019 Variety forecast that Disney’s Marvel streaming shows would have “budgets comparable to a Marvel film.” Star Wars was expected to get the same treatment and it looked like money well spent by Disney.

Its first Star Wars streaming series, The Mandalorian, debuted with the launch of Disney+ and pretty much singlehandedly made it an out-of-the-box success. The show charts the exploits of the eponymous armor-clad bounty hunter tasked with tracking down the family of a pointy-eared green alien called Grogu who took the world by storm because of its cute appearance and resemblance to classic Star Wars character Yoda.

Unlike Disney’s Star Wars movies, The Mandalorian had rustic settings and storylines inspired by westerns which won over fans and critics alike. Indeed, it was such a critical success that it was renewed for two subsequent seasons with the latest airing last year. Its first season won seven Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards including the prestigious category of Outstanding Cinematography For A Single-Camera Series.

The second series debuted in October 2020 and scored the same number of Emmy awards. It also became the first program on a streaming platform other than Netflix to claim the top spot on Nielsen’s rankings which contributed to Disney+ subscriber numbers steadily rising throughout the following year. They get access to all of the content on the platform so it isn’t possible to attribute subscription revenue to specific shows which prevents their profit from being calculated. However, there is no doubt that after season two was released, there was a disturbance in the force.

The third series of The Mandalorian won just one Emmy – in the Outstanding Stunt Performance category – and became the first to face a backlash from fans. The first two seasons both earned an audience score of over 90% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes but the third plummeted to just 50%. It wasn’t driven by online trolls.

James Hibberd of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that there was “some credence to the blowback” as the complaints weren’t centered around one thing. Hibberd explained that there were “a miasma of grievances ranging from plotting and dialogue to unconvincing special effects to jarring cameos” including ones from Christopher Lloyd and Jack Black, which he described as “campy”.

According to Nielsen, the third season opened to 823 million minutes of viewing which was 20% lower than the premiere of the second series but not low enough to stop Disney from commissioning a big screen movie based on the Mandalorian and his pointy-eared partner. It is set to be released in 2026, though no further seasons of the show are due to air. It is far from the only one of Disney’s Star Wars shows which has suffered the same fate.

In 2021, The Mandalorian spinoff The Book of Boba Fett debuted on Disney+ and, as Hibberd eloquently put it, this is where some problems with the franchise’s TV efforts first emerged. He describes it as a “struggling show” which was “weirdly clunky” as two Mandalorian episodes were inexplicably sandwiched into its line-up of seven.

The Book of Boba Fett was based on one of the most iconic characters in the Star Wars saga so Disney was taking a tremendous risk by commissioning the show. Fans have such strong feelings about Boba Fett that it was inevitable the show wouldn’t appeal to all of them. However, Disney proceeded regardless, driven by a desire to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of the Star Wars Intellectual Property. Perhaps unsurprisingly it didn’t please everyone and the show scored just 49% on Rotten Tomatoes. Originally designed to be an ongoing series, it is now considered to have reached the end of the road.

Undeterred, Disney proceeded with yet another spinoff based on a beloved character. This time it was Star Wars sage Obi-Wan Kenobi, played in the original movies by Oscar-winner Alec Guinness and, more recently Scottish actor Ewan McGregor. According to Nielsen, it opened in May 2022 to just over 1 billion minutes of viewing which was little more than The Mandalorian’s lackluster third season. Worse still, it fell to 860 million for the finale with the audience giving Obi-Wan Kenobi a rating of 61% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Unlike The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi was always designed to be a limited series and there are no current plans for more episodes which is perhaps just as well given how it fared with fans.

There was a repeat performance in 2023 with the release of Ahsoka, based on yet another fan-favorite character. By then fans had begun to tire of Disney’s relentless iteration of the format and the audience scored it 64% on Rotten Tomatoes. With 829 million minutes viewed, its premiere ratings were a shade over The Mandalorian’s season three opener but fell sharply to an average of around 570 million minutes for the rest of its run. Despite this, Disney couldn’t let it go and announced in January that a second season of Ahsoka is in development.

Then came The Acolyte. Easily the most controversial of Disney’s Star Wars shows, its creative direction and diversity attracted fierce debate leaving it with an audience score of just 18% which is lower than the notorious 1978 Star Wars: Holiday Special.

The premiere of The Acolyte entered Nielsen’s rankings in just seventh place with 488 million minutes viewed but by the end of its run it had crashed to 335 million which Deadline said was the lowest for a Star Wars series finale. It was such a steep drop that plans for a second season were scrapped just over a month after the first one ended. It wasn’t for want of trying.

As we revealed, filings from Disney show that $230.1 million (£172.7 million) had been spent on the series when it was only part of the way through post production.

The costs of streaming shows are usually a closely-guarded secret as studios combine the amount spent on all of their productions in their expenses and don’t itemize them separately in their filings.

Disney doesn’t discuss the costs of individual productions and did not respond to a request for comment. However, detailed analysis of its filings lifts the curtain on precisely how much it spends on a number of its productions.

When studios film in the United Kingdom they tend to set up subsidiaries there which file detailed financial statements as part of the process of claiming a reimbursement of up to 25.5% of their costs. The UK government pays this as a reward to shows which film in the UK and The Acolyte was one of them. Surprisingly, it was far from the most expensive Star Wars show Disney has made in the UK.

That honor goes to 2022’s Andor, which has been the brightest spot in the Star Wars galaxy since the second season of The Mandalorian debuted back in 2020. Andor stars Mexican actor Diego Luna as the eponymous spy who works for the heroic Rebels as they try to take on the might of the Empire, led by legendary villain Darth Vader.

Andor is set five years before the tremendously-successful original Star Wars trilogy and feels equally grounded thanks to its heavy use of practical effects and physical sets rather that the digital backdrops which are common in other Disney Star Wars productions as we have reported.

With an audience score of 87%, Andor has a higher rating on Rotten Tomatoes than any of Disney’s other Star Wars streaming shows which explains why a second season was given the green light and it is due to debut next year. Andor’s score is even higher than any of Disney’s Star Wars movies with the exception of 2016’s spinoff film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story which also starred Luna. Like Rogue One, Andor didn’t come cheap.

Recent filings reveal that by the time filming for the second season of Andor began in November 2022, Disney had spent a staggering $351.8 million (£270.8 million) on the show. As the chart below shows, this is 8% more than the cost of making Rogue One and a shade less than the $364.5 million (£278.3 million) spent on 2018 box office bomb, Solo: A Star Wars Story.

The spending on Andor is shown in the filings for Disney’s subsidiary E&E Industries (UK) which produced the show. It was founded in October 2018 to work on Obi-Wan Kenobi, which was planned at the time to be a feature film shot in the historic Pinewood Studios outside London. Disney had a rethink following the failure of Solo, which lost more than $90 million at the box office as we revealed. As a result of this, Obi-Wan Kenobi became a Disney+ streaming series and filming was due to begin in summer 2020. It was not to be.

Production was put on hold in mid-January 2020 after Disney reportedly became concerned that the storyline was too similar to The Mandalorian as it involved Kenobi protecting a young Luke Skywalker, famously played by Mark Hamill in the original Star Wars movies.

The delay proved to be a blessing in disguise as the pandemic soon sent the world into lockdown giving time for the Obi-Wan Kenobi script to be reworked. By May 2021 the crew had gathered in Los Angeles and filming finally began.

The filings for E&E Industries (UK) reveal that a total of $7.2 million (£5.6 million) had been spent by October 31, 2019, not long before pre-production on Obi-Wan Kenobi was halted. It is likely that more was spent on the show in the intervening time but the bulk of the cost should show on the October 31 filings.

E&E Industries (UK) wasn’t mothballed when Obi-Wan Kenobi was put on hold. Instead, it became the production company for Andor which was also shot at Pinewood and on location across the UK. A futuristic metro station in London doubled for the Imperial Security Bureau on the alien planet of Coruscant whilst the resort planet Niamos was actually a seaside town in the north of England.’

In an interview on ComicBookMovie, Andor’s special effects supervisor Neal Scanlan revealed that around six weeks of pre-production had been done on Andor by the time that the UK went into lockdown at the end of March 2020.

Filming was delayed repeatedly due to the pandemic and E&E Industries (UK) was handed a $1.6 million (£1.2 million) grant by the UK government to compensate for this. It also banked $2 million (£1.5 million) from an insurance claim which came in handy.

The filings show that when shooting was underway on April 5, 2021, a massive 3,782 people were working on Andor with women representing 35.9% of the crew. On average, they were only paid 0.7% less per hour than their male colleagues making it one of Disney’s most equitable productions. With such a large workforce it’s perhaps unsurprising that Andor’s costs were so high.

Filming had ended by late September 2021 and by late November, a total of $271.6 million (£202.9 million) had been spent on the show, including the $7.2 million of expenses on Obi-Wan Kenobi. Over the following year a further $80.2 million (£67.9 million) was spent on Andor, and it is believed that this was largely dedicated to post-production as the show premiered in September 2022. However, pre-production on series two also accounted for some of the spending as it began filming in November 2022, which is when the filings are dated.

Excluding the $7.2 million of Obi-Wan Kenobi expenses puts the spending on Andor season one and pre-production of season two at around $344.6 million but it doesn’t stop there. It also received a $70.9 million (£54.6 million) reimbursement in return for filming in the UK. This brings Andor’s costs down to $273.7 million which is still more than the $269.6 million net spending on Rogue One and not far off the $298.9 million net expense of Solo.

It is considerably better value for money than either of them given its length. The 12 episodes of Andor were a total of 547 minutes long compared to 133 for Rogue One and 135 for Solo. It gives Andor a cost of around $500k per minute compared to $2 million for Rogue One and $2.2 million for Solo. Crucially, the filings reveal that the cost of Andor was within its budget whereas Solo and Rogue One were not. It appears that season two of Andor is following in its predecessor’s footsteps.

It too was made in the UK and although filings showing the cost of filming it have not yet been released, the breakdown of its staff has come to light. When filming was in full swing on April 5, 2023 it had just 1,067 employees, less than a third of the number who worked on the season one just two years earlier. If it has lower costs than its predecessor but is just as well-received it really will be a force to be reckoned with.