“Andor” has wrapped up, and the ambitious “Star Wars” prequel series leading directly into the events of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” has been quite the franchise event, and likely one not to be replicated anytime soon, given the reveal of the show’s insanely massive budget.
While speaking on a panel at the ATX Television Festival (via IndieWire), creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy revealed that Disney had told him that “streaming is dead” but still ended up shelling out a MASSIVE $650 million for the total budget of the 24 episodes.
READ MORE: New ‘Star Wars’ Series In The Works From ‘Lost’ Showrunner & ‘Watchmen’ Writer Carlton & Nick Cuse
Gilroy said that the deep political nature of “Andor” was a bit of a leap of faith for a risk-averse company like Disney. “I’ve been allowed to start using the word ‘fascism’ the last couple weeks. That’s liberating. But I don’t think it should be any surprise or even be too slippery or complicated for people to understand the road I have to walk to do all this; to maximize the audience and protect the investment of a really brave [company].”

But Disney did put their money where their mouth was and gave Gilroy the kind of creative freedom you don’t often see alongside a budget that will make your jaw drop, “I mean, Disney, this is $650 million. 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?’ … 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.”
The shocking sentiment from Disney that “streaming is dead” is a little perplexing, given that the company has been dead-set on funneling resources from Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm to the streaming service, that have arubly impacted the film divisions negatively. Then again, they’ve since been public about how diverting tentpole-level properties to streaming hasn’t been exactly a winning strategy for them, leading to a pivot and scale-back with the MCU.
Meanwhile, that pricetag for “Andor” would average out to a hefty $27 million an episode, but given the scope and scale of what they were trying to accomplish, that figure is likely warranted.
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That said, Disney and Lucasfilm aren’t ending their TV projects anytime soon as “Ahsoka” season two is currently in production, overseen by Dave Filoni, with Hayden Christensen officially back as the force ghost of Anakin Skywalker. Alongside a new mysterious series project coming from creatives Carlton and Nick Cruse.