It started with Game of Thrones, as many things do. HBO’s epic fantasy show was the most popular TV series of the 2010s, in part because it was created on a scale that few people had seen before. The biggest episodes of Game of Thrones rivaled the biggest Hollywood movies for shock and awe, and that required a record-breaking budget.
Or at least it was record-breaking at the time. Since Game of Thrones paved the way, a lot of networks have thrown tons of money at TV shows, with new records being broken all the time.
But unlike Game of Thrones, not all of these shows are hits. In fact, some are downright obscure. These expensive failures are a weird consequence of a time when networks and streaming services were determined to compete with each other to build the biggest TV show known to man, only to come up embarrassingly short. Today, we celebrate the attempts.
HBO’s Harry Potter show will be a huge hit, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it
Who would’ve thought there’d ever be this much controversy over Harry Potter?
Citadel
The franchise that wasn’t
This is the show that inspired this article. Citadel is a spy drama created by Joe and Anthony Russo, best known as the directors of The Avengers movies. Amazon hoped they could work a little of that magic for Prime Video, so they drafted the Russos into building out a big franchise for them, and this is what they came up with.
Amazon spent $300 million on the first season alone, which ran for six episodes. In the end, those episodes were pretty generic and the show failed to catch on. Amazon still went ahead with a pair of spin-off shows — Citadel: Diana and Citadel: Honey Bunny — but they were both canceled after one season apiece.
Citadel is a good example of what happens when you put the cart before the horse. Amazon went into this expecting to create a huge new franchise out of thin air, but you can’t guarantee that people will be interested. They weren’t, and now the second season — likely made at a fraction of the budget — will drop all seven of its episodes on May 6. The trailer makes Season 2 look more fun than Season 1 did, but it may be too little too late.
- Release Date
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April 28, 2023
- Network
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Prime Video
- Showrunner
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David Weil
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Richard Madden
Mason Kane / Kyle Conroy
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Priyanka Chopra Jonas
Nadia Sinh
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Stanley Tucci
Bernard Orlick
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Ashleigh Cummings
Abby Conroy
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
The Game of Thrones killer that wasn’t
Amazon may have a spending problem. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is the most expensive TV show in history, with Amazon spending $250 million just to get the rights to the IP and then spending around $465 million on the first season. The show, which is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, has been a hit for Prime Video, but to be worth the money, it would need to be a phenomenon.
The third season of The Rings of Power is expected to come out later this year, and Amazon tentatively still has plans to make five seasons overall. That will run the company over a billion by the end. The show isn’t terrible, but it’s not fantastic either, and isn’t The Lord of the Rings story a lot of fans would prefer to see. It also rankles a bit that this series gets to continue when Amazon canceled The Wheel of Time, a superior fantasy drama.
- Release Date
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September 1, 2022
- Network
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Amazon Prime Video
- Showrunner
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John D. Payne, Patrick McKay, Louise Hooper, Charlotte Brändström, Wayne Yip
- Directors
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J.A. Bayona, Sanaa Hamri
- Writers
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Patrick McKay, John D. Payne, J.R.R. Tolkien, Justin Doble, Jason Cahill, Gennifer Hutchison, Stephany Folsom, Nicholas Adams
- Franchise(s)
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The Lord of the Rings
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-
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Charles Edwards
Lord Celebrimbor
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Markella Kavenagh
Nori Brandyfoot
Secret Invasion
Diminishing returns, Marvel-style
Like Game of Thrones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been hugely influential on the entertainment industry, but lately it’s been struggling to justify itself. One of the big danger signs was Secret Invasion, a Disney+ TV series that aired in 2023. The show follows Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) as he tries to get a handle on a radical faction of Skrull aliens. It’s one of the worst reviewed TV shows in the MCU, but it’s also the most expensive at $212 million spread across six episodes.
Marvel shows in general tend to be very expensive, with Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and Moon Knight also all costing more than $20 million per episode. And none of those shows set the world on fire either, so you figure Marvel has to be reassessing how much it spends on this stuff right about now.
- Release Date
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2023 – 2023-00-00
- Showrunner
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Kyle Bradstreet
- Directors
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Ali Selim
- Writers
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Kyle Bradstreet
- Franchise(s)
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Marvel Cinematic Universe
See
The post-apocalyptic epic no one saw
See is an epic drama set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans have lost their sense of sight. That includes lead character Baba Voss, a chieftain played by Jason Momoa. When a pair of siblings are born with the ability to see, Baba Voss vows to protect them.
This is an original idea not tied at all to an existing IP, which often means that a studio will insist on a small budget. But Apple TV+ has a history of diving into the deep end sight unseen, so they spent $15 million per episode in the first season. If that kept up over all three seasons, the final price tag would have come to around $360 million. Baba Voss’ brother Edo Voss, played by wrestling superstar Dave Bautista, was introduced in Season 2. Between Momoa and Bautista, the salaries alone would have cost a pretty penny.
It’s not that See is a bad show, but it is bizarre how expensive it is given how small a cultural footprint it has.
- Release Date
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2019 – 2022-00-00
- Showrunner
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Steven Knight
- Directors
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Steven Knight
- Writers
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Steven Knight
The Witcher
Everyone aboard the sinking ship
The Witcher, an adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy books, started out as a celebrated hit for Netflix. But as it went on, audiences started to turn on it, especially after it was announced that leading man Henry Cavill would exit after Season 3 and get replaced by Liam Hemsworth. User ratings for the fourth season were truly dire, spin-off projects like The Witcher: Blood Origin and The Rats: A Witcher Tale were dead on arrival, and now a lot of people are just waiting for the show to finally conclude with Season 5 later this year.
Through it all, Netflix has spent north of $10 million per episode on The Witcher, with some reports putting the spend for Season 4 much higher. That’s a lot of money to spend just for audiences to hate you.
- Release Date
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December 20, 2019
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Lauren Schmidt Hissrich
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Henry Cavill
Geralt of Rivia
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Anya Chalotra
Yennefer of Vengerberg
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Freya Allan
Princess Cirilla ‘Ciri’ of Cintra
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A way out
There are other shows you’d be probably be surprised to hear cost a ton of money, like Paramount’s garbled adaptation of the Halo video game franchise or Peacock’s foul-mouthed comedy Ted, based on the movie where Seth MacFarlane voices a sentient teddy bear. It feels like something may need to change.
A solution may come from the same people who started this mess: HBO’s new Game of Thrones show A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was a hit when it aired earlier this year, and has a second season on the way. It’s also much cheaper and simpler than Game of Thrones was at its peak, so maybe everyone will follow this franchise again, this time into affordability.
