The New York Times takes a look at Disney’s upcoming streaming service and executive Ricky Strauss, who has oversight of the programming. But for our immediate purposes, there is one new nugget here: Jon Favreau’s live-action Star Wars series has a rough budget of “$100 million for 10 episodes.”
“‘Star Wars’ is a big world, and Disney’s new streaming service affords a wonderful opportunity to tell stories that stretch out over multiple chapters,” Mr. Favreau said in an email. He added of Mr. Strauss: “Marketing is about telling a story, and his background in that area allows us to collaborate and create new content.”
Information on the Favreau series is thin on the ground, but we do know he’s writing the whole season, it will feature brand-new characters, and it’s set three years after Return of the Jedi.
$10M an episode is roughly equivalent to the episode budget for past episodes of Game of Thrones. The final season of that show is now up to $15M an episode, per Variety last year. High-end TV episodes generally come out to about $5 million-$7 million an hour. The $10M price tag also puts this in the range of The Crown, which is one of Netflix’s most expensive shows.
We also get a timeline for when Disney’s new movies will stop rolling out to Netflix: March’s Captain Marvel will be the first to go to the new service, which means we can expect Solo on Netflix.
