‘Streaming is dead’ — Disney’s waning appetite for big budget productions dogged creator of popular Star Wars series Andor

• Andor creator Tony Gilroy reveals he had to fight tooth and nail with company execs to bring his second season of the critically acclaimed Star Wars series to life, as Disney told him “we don’t have the money we had before.” All told the two seasons and 24 episodes of Andor, the best received Star Wars series on Disney+, cost $650 million to produce.

After a golden era of top-notch content for the small screen, is streaming now dead? 

That was at least the message Walt Disney managers wanted to impart on Andor’s acclaimed creator Tony Gilroy when he began filming the past twelve episodes for the 126 million Disney+ subscribers.

“In Season 2, they said ‘streaming is dead, we don’t have the money we had before,” Gilroy said at the ATX Television Festival in comments reported by IndieWire, “so we fought hard about money.” 

All told, production costs for the 24 mostly hour-long episodes across two seasons ran to $650 million, he said. A source familiar with the production told Variety the episodes cost roughly $20 million each after tax incentives, similar to the reported budgets of Warner Bros. Discovery’s House of the Dragon and Severance from AppleTV+.

Disney did not respond to a Fortune request for comment.

Ever since Rian Johnson’s hugely divisive The Last Jedi eight years ago, Lucasfilm has struggled to win fans of George Lucas’ epic Star Wars trilogy back to his rich universe. A feature film hasn’t hit theaters since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, the disappointing conclusion to Rey Palpatine’s saga.

Andor has been the rare bright spot for the Disney studio, becoming easily the most critically acclaimed Star Wars entry on Disney+, according to Rotten Tomatoes.  

Turnaround at Disney’s direct-to-consumer streaming operations

When the entertainment giant first launched its streaming service Disney+ in late 2019, money was no object as CEO Bob Iger needed more and more content to chase subscribers in the race with larger rival Netflix. 

But after a series of expensive flops including Lucasfilm’s own fantasy series Willow and The Acolyte, set in the same Star Wars universe as Andor, the cash Disney was throwing around began to dry up. 

In February 2023, Iger pledged to investors he would slash $3 billion in content costs as part of a wider plan to achieve sustained profitability at its Entertainment Direct-To-Consumer streaming operations.

Last month Disney posted its third straight quarterly operating profit for streaming, which now also fully consolidates Hulu after acquiring the remaining minority stake from Comcast. The Entertainment DTC business is now a core driver of earnings growth.

In the first fiscal half through the end of March, the segment swung to $629 million operating profit from a loss of $91 million a year earlier, more than offsetting declines in its Linear Networks segment comprised of broadcast and cable assets. 

By comparison, only cash-rich tech companies seem to have the financial firepower to continue financing heavy losses with little regard to achieving profitability, a luxury that legacy media companies can ill afford. Apple, for example, has reportedly been willing to fund its streaming ambitions to the tune of $1 billion in losses on average per year.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com