Disney Spent More On ‘Andor’ Than Any Of Its ‘Star Wars’ Movies

Streaming series ‘Andor’ has cost Disney more than any of its ‘Star Wars’ movies.

Lucasfilm

Disney has revealed today that it spent $60.5 million (£47.9 million) on the second season of Star Wars streaming series Andor in 2024 ahead of its debut in April this year giving the show a total cost of $705.5 million (£552.7 million) which was within the budget but still far higher than the spending on any of the movies in the sci-fi saga.

Disney has had a mixed bag of results from its Star Wars shows and movies since it bought the creator of the series, Lucasfilm, for $4 billion in 2012. All the stars aligned for The Force Awakens, the first in Disney’s trilogy of sequels to the original films which kicked off in 1977.

The Force Awakens grossed $2.1 billion and earned an impressive audience score of 84% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. However, its 2017 follow up, The Last Jedi, was only rated 41% and although the audience score shot back up to 86% for The Rise of Skywalker, the final film in the trilogy, it only grossed $1.1 billion at the box office.

Star Wars hasn’t been seen on the silver screen since then and instead the Mouse has concentrated on streaming shows for its Disney+ platform but they too experienced a disturbance in the force.

The first in the series was 2019’s The Mandalorian which followed the eponymous armor-clad bounty hunter tasked with protecting a pointy-eared green alien called Grogu. The cute critter took the world by storm and the first season scored a whopping 93% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

A sequel was inevitable and that maintained the original’s high standards with a 91% audience score. However, it crashed to just 51% for the third season in 2023 and the malaise didn’t stop there. The following year Disney released The Acolyte which was famously attacked for its emphasis on diversity and ended up with an audience score of just 19% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The only one of Disney’s Star Wars franchises that has managed to maintain audience appeal across several seasons is Andor which stars Mexican actor Diego Luna as the eponymous spy working for the heroic Rebels as they take on the might of the Empire, led by legendary villain Darth Vader. Set five years before the tremendously-successful original Star Wars trilogy, Andor feels equally grounded thanks to its heavy use of practical effects and physical sets rather that the digital backdrops which are common on other Star Wars productions as this report explained.

It was a winner with audiences earning an 88% Rotten Tomatoes rating for its first season which debuted in 2022. It took three years for its successor to drop as filming of season two was heavily delayed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023. It was worth the wait as season two opened in April this year to an audience score of 89%. It didn’t come cheap.

The cost of making streaming shows is usually a closely-guarded secret as studios combine all of them in their expenses and don’t itemize how much they spent on each one. Shows made in the United Kingdom are exceptions and Andor was one of them.

Studios filming in the U.K. get a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country. Until last year it came in the form of a tax credit but the cash is now counted as revenue. The key condition of receiving it is that at least 10% of the core costs of the production have to be incurred in the U.K. and in order to demonstrate this to the authorities, studios set up separate companies to produce each show they make there. They shine a spotlight on the spending because the companies are obliged to file legally-binding financial statements which reveal everything from the production’s overall cost and level of reimbursement to the headcount, salaries and even the social security payments to staff. It takes some detective work to get to the bottom of this.

The companies have code names so that they don’t raise attention with fans when filing for permits to film on location. Andor was made by Disney’s subsidiary E&E Industries (UK) which was originally founded in October 2018 to work on a feature film about iconic Star Wars character Obi-Wan Kenobi. Disney had a rethink following the failure of its movie based on Star Wars stalwart Han Solo which was released earlier that year. It lost $103.3 million at the box office as this report revealed and as a result of this, Obi-Wan Kenobi became a Disney+ show. Filming was due to begin in summer 2020 but 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 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 2019 filings.

E&E Industries wasn’t mothballed when Obi-Wan Kenobi was put on hold. Instead, it became the production company for Andor and both seasons of the show were shot at the historic Pinewood Studios outside London. It was also filmed on location across the U.K. with a futuristic metro station in London doubling for the Imperial Security Bureau on the alien planet of Coruscant while 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 U.K. went into lockdown at the end of March 2020.

Filming was delayed repeatedly due to the pandemic and E&E Industries was handed a $1.6 million (£1.2 million) grant by the U.K. government along with $2 million (£1.5 million) from an insurance claim.

As with all U.K. companies, E&E Industries releases its filings in stages long after the period they relate to. The process starts during pre-production and continues long after the premiere in order to give the production team time to ensure that all the bills are paid. It explains why the company today released its financial statements to November 22, 2024 which show that by then a total of $705.5 million had been spent on both seasons of the show. The second season debuted precisely five months after the date of the financial statements so the cost is likely to rise in the subsequent set of filings next year.

Excluding the $7.2 million of expenses for Obi-Wan Kenobi puts the total spending on the two seasons of Andor at around $698.3 million and the financial statements reveal that they were both “within the production budget.” It doesn’t stop there.

E&E Industries also received a total reimbursement and tax credit of $142.3 million (£111.5 million) which brought Disney’s net spending on Andor down to $552.4 million after deducting the insurance payout and the payment from the pandemic grant. One of the biggest single expenses shown in the financial statements was the $85.5 million (£66.9 million) paid to staff which is the highest wage bill for any of the shows and movies made by Disney in the U.K. over the past 15 years.

Staff numbers on Andor peaked in 2023 at a monthly average of 501 people which doesn’t include freelancers, contractors and temporary workers as they aren’t listed as employees on the books of U.K. companies even though they often represent the majority of the crew on a film shoot.

Last year Disney announced that since 2019 it has spent $4.8 billion (£3.5 billion) on production in the U.K. across 41 shows and 29 feature films supporting more than 32,000 jobs. It is a good portion of the total.

The latest data from the British Film Institute (BFI) shows that in 2019 alone, film making generated a total of 37,685 jobs in London and 7,775 throughout the rest of the U.K. The BFI’s triennial Screen Business report added that when the wider impacts of the film content value chain are taken into consideration, 49,845 jobs were created in London in 2019 and 19,085 throughout the rest of the U.K.

In February the BFI released its latest annual data which showed that foreign studios contributed a massive 87% of the $2.6 billion (£2.1 billion) spent on making films in the U.K. in 2024. This doesn’t just keep people in jobs but also drives spending on services such as security, equipment hire, transport and catering. It remains to be seen how long this glow will last.

In May President Trump rocked Hollywood with the announcement that a 100% tariff will be applied to movies entering the United States that are produced in “foreign lands”. It was an attempt to bring film making back to the U.S. and although it has yet to be implemented, it hasn’t been forgotten.

In late September Trump wrote on social media that “in order to solve this long time, never ending problem, I will be imposing a 100% Tariff on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States.” If he doesn’t follow through with this threat, he may have to roll out the red carpet by offering Hollywood studios even more lucrative incentives than they get in the U.K. in order to tempt them back home.