‘Star Wars’ spin-off show ‘Andor’ creator Tony Gilroy reveals Disney spent over $650 million on it

Dropping the bombshell news at a recent Q&A at the ATX Television Festival, as per Variety, Gilroy said “I mean, (for) Disney this is $650 million.” Read further on Dynamite News:

Los Angeles: ‘Andor’ creator Tony Gilroy, in a startling revelation, said that Disney spent over $650 million on two seasons of the highly-acclaimed ‘Star Wars’ series ‘Andor’.

A prequel to the highly-lauded 2016 film ‘Rogue One’ – which itself was a prequel to the original film ‘New Hope’, the story centres around Rebel pilot, spy, and assassin Cassian Andor, played by actor Diego Luna.

The show marked a stark difference from Disney’s family-friendly approach to ‘Star Wars’, and was a departure from most of the franchise, featuring none of the grand space battles, or lightsaber duels.

Instead, the show was a much darker and more gritty drama, putting the perspective of the average man living within the Empire’s reign, from its smaller departments to its highest security offices, on the structure of the Imperial regime, its malicious designs as well as its blatant disregard for life, and the smallest cogs in its giagantic machine, which were shown in the films and serials.

Dropping the bombshell news at a recent Q&A at the ATX Television Festival, as per Variety, Gilroy said “I mean, (for) Disney this is $650 million."

Disney did not respond to Gilroy’s comments, though the show’s grand and polished production definitely indicates a massive budget.

“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.”

Back in 2023 during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, the ‘Andor’ production was halted in a strong setback for Disney which was already reeling from losses. The delay cost the studio an additional $20 million.

This meant that while Gilroy had full creative control, he had to deliver something of quality that justified the budget, a task in which he more than seems to have succeeded in, as ‘Andor’, despite its heavy variation from the standard narrative was lauded heavily by critics and audiences alike, with many calling it the finest thing to come out of ‘Star Wars’ in years.