Axed Fan Favorite Disney Streaming Series Cost Just $17 Million Per Episode

At $17 million per episode, ‘Willow’ came in at a much lower cost than many other high profile Disney+ series. ©2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

Amanda Searle / Lucasfilm Ltd.

A cut-price streaming series based on a beloved franchise with a fervent fanbase sounds like a dream ticket which could run for season after season. Not for Disney.

Filings released by the studio this week reveal that the total net cost of its sword and sorcery streaming series Willow came to $136.3 million giving it an average price tag of just $17 million across each of its eight episodes which premiered in November 2022.

It is a staggering 45.3% cheaper than Disney’s Marvel Studios streaming show Secret Invasion and 27.3% less than its Star Wars streaming series The Acolyte. Remarkably, Willow only cost around 20% more per episode than Gary Oldman’s spy drama Slow Horses which lacks lavish visual effects and has run for five seasons so far.

However, despite Willow’s impeccable cost control, Disney brought the curtain down on the show after just one season. That’s not all as it was one of nearly 50 titles pulled from the Disney+ streaming platform in May 2023 angering Warwick Davis, who gives a commanding performance as the eponymous sorcerer.

Writing on X last year he posted a photo of himself on the Willow set with the caption “it’s a travesty that @DisneyPlus value shareholders over subscribers in their creative decision-making. #Justsaying I only ever saw each episode once!” He had previously called the removal of the series “embarrassing” saying on X that he meets “lovely people on a daily basis who are fans” of Willow, and “who are the reason the @DisneyPlus Series was made.” Addressing his message to Disney, he said “what do I say to these subscribers when they ask why they can’t watch the series any more?”

He wasn’t exaggerating about the appeal of the show as critics awarded it 84% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, a 32 percentage point increase on the 1988 Lucasfilm movie it was based on. Also called Willow, its characters were created by Star Wars founder George Lucas. The streaming series was developed by executive producer Jonathan Kasdan, whose father Lawrence co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Force Awakens and Raiders of the Lost Ark for Lucasfilm.

Disney acquired the rights to Willow when it bought Lucasfilm from Lucas for $4 billion in 2012. Seven years later, Ron Howard, director of the original movie, revealed that he had been approached by Jonathan Kasdan about working on a sequel series for Disney+ and in October 2020 it got the green light. The series debuted just over two years later and ran until January 2023. A second season was in development at the time but filings from Disney confirm that this has been abandoned. It left fans asking questions.

Talking recently to The Hollywood Reporter, American actress Ruby Cruz, who plays princess Kit Tanthalos in the show, said that Willow’s cancelation hit her hard. “People still reach out and say some of the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful things about what Kit brought to them,” she revealed.

Willow “reached the people it needed to reach. Of course, I also feel conflicted about it. It brought so many people joy, and it taught me so many things. So it breaks my heart that people can’t watch it any more and I support people in wanting answers.” Remarkably, even though the show didn’t have a blockbuster budget, cost was probably the driving force behind its demise.

When Willow was commissioned, the pandemic had thrown much of the world into lockdown leaving consumers craving new streaming content. They were flush with furlough cash so could afford multiple streaming subscriptions putting studios in competition with each other to see which one could attract the most business.

Shows were commissioned to tempt subscribers but by the time many of them came on stream the Covid-19 vaccine had rolled out enabling people to return to work. It gave them less time to watch streaming shows and, at the same time, purse strings were pulled tight thanks to a cost of living crisis as governments had to cover the cost of the furlough payments.

The colossal cost of commissioning new content left Disney’s Direct To Consumer (DTC) division with huge losses which stand at a total of $10 billion to this day. Willow only contributed a tiny amount of this black hole and there’s no doubt about that.

The budgets of most streaming shows are a closely-guarded secret as studios combine their spending on all of them in their overall expenses and don’t itemize how much each one cost. The big exceptions are shows which are made in the United Kingdom as studios set up separate companies there for each production they shoot in the country.

This is a key part of a process which enables studios to get a reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the U.K. and it has attracted Hollywood’s leading lights to the country.

The money is paid in the form of a cash tax credit and it shines a spotlight on the secretive cost of making streaming shows. That is because the U.K. production companies have to file financial statements which show everything from the total cost and the amount of reimbursement right down to the number of people on the crew and their social security payments.

The production companies have code names to stop them raising attention with fans when filing for permits to shoot on location. The Disney subsidiary behind Willow is called Barking Lion Productions (UK), in a nod to the mythical creatures that populate the show.

As with all U.K. companies, its financial statements are filed in stages long after the period they relate to. This starts during pre-production and continues after the premiere to give the company time to ensure it has collected all of its bills and received the money for them. It means that the costs of a production can still rise years after release though not usually by anywhere near as much as when it is being made.

This explains why Barking Lion Productions recently filed its results for the year to December 31, 2024 which is long after the show debuted. The financial statements reveal that $5.4 million (£4.3 million) was spent during the year bringing the total cost of the show to $177.7 million (£137 million) which was “in line with the production budget”.

It then banked a $35.5 million (£27.4 million) tax credit as well as a $5.4 million (£4 million) grant from filming in a country within the U.K. called Wales which offers additional fiscal incentives to studios. Next came $460,543 (£362,962) of miscellaneous income including bank interest and a British Film Institute Lottery grant.

It brought Disney’s net spending on Willow down to $136.3 million though this still didn’t stop it from getting axed and removed from Disney+. There is good reason for that.

Pulling the shows enables Disney to take an impairment charge on them as it spent money on productions that it deemed not to be viable. It is essentially a reduction in the value of an asset and this creates a loss on the company’s balance sheet which reduces its tax bill. In short, removing the show gave Disney’s bottom line a magic touch which was much needed after its DTC division had burned up billions of dollars of losses.

Disney isn’t the only studio which has taken this approach. Warner Bros. Discovery pioneered it by pulling dozens of titles from its HBO Max streaming platform to get tax write-offs or to loan them out to Free Ad-Supported TV (FAST) services. Many of its rivals followed suit including Paramount Global which took this approach in order to downsize its Showtime platform. Studios realized that some titles are more valuable earning ad dollars on FAST platforms than they are sitting on a streaming platform’s library. Likewise, streaming leader Netflix has benefited by licensing shows from studios which want to extract more money from them.

As Disney’s chief executive Bob Iger explained to analysts last year, “we are already doing some licensing with Netflix and we’re looking selectively at other possibilities. I don’t want to declare that it’s a direction we’ll go more aggressively or not, but we certainly are taking a look at it and being expansive in our thinking about it.

“We had previously thought that exclusivity, meaning our own product on our own platforms, had huge value. It definitely does have some value. But as you know, we’re also watching as some studios have licensed content to third-party streamers, and that creates more traction, more awareness, and in effect it increases not only the value of the content from a financial perspective, but just in terms of traction. So we’re going to – we’re looking at it with an open mind, but I don’t think you should expect that we’ll do a significant amount of it.”

With $10 billion of accrued losses to pay off don’t expect Willow to return to Disney+ any time soon.