Star Wars: Andor creator reveals Disney spent over $1 billion dollars making the show

The eye-watering amount of money Disney spent on one of its most acclaimed shows has finally been exposed.

The creator of Disney+ series Andor has revealed the staggering amount that Disney spent on the critically acclaimed show.

The series, which has run for two seasons and comprises 24 episodes in total, has been a major success for the streaming giant and has helped revive interest in a franchise that has suffered major flops in recent years.

Despite the huge financial losses from projects like Solo: A Star Wars Story, Andor creator Tony Gilroy was speaking on a panel during the ATX Television Festival when he revealed just how much money Disney had thrown at the project.

Diego Luna in season two of Disney+ series Andor. Picture: Disney

“I mean, [for] Disney this is $650 million [USD$1 billion],” Gilroy said. “For 24 episodes, I never took a note. We said ‘F**k 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.”

Gilroy revealed that Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy was the show’s biggest champion and the reason a lot of this got done.

He said that his previous work on a Star Wars project, the critically lauded Rogue One, help him gauge what Disney might allow him to include in the show, and then he put those limits to the test by including phrases such as “genocide” in the script and opening the series in a Brothel.

Tony Gilroy has revealed the huge budget Disney spent on Andor. Picture: Getty.

“I worked on ‘Rogue [One]’ so I knew what the [permissible] levels of violence were, and actually the rules loosened up considerably,” Gilroy said. “Yeah, we can’t have skin, but I very consciously started the first scene in a brothel just to see what would happen and how far we could go. There’s sex. … It’s something that probably seemed at some point like it was going to be a big anxiety, and it really turned out to be a nothing-burger all the way through.”

Gilroy previously told Variety that he “wrote a legal brief” to Disney when he was trying to get the studio to allow him to say “f**k the empire” in the show. However, despite his best efforts, Disney execs refused to let him get it into the show.

“I wrote a memo on it and said, ‘Here’s why I think it’s economically prudent, and here’s why I think it’s good’. Disney wouldn’t let us use it,” director Benjamin Caron added. “So we changed it to ‘fight the empire.’ I remember having a call with Tony Gilroy saying, ‘Are we gonna get away with this?’”

Originally published as Star Wars: Andor creator reveals Disney spent over $1 billion dollars making the show