News culture This series thrown in the trash by Disney+ cost 100 million dollars, it’s a superb waste
Published on 01/09/2023 at 09:46
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We’re talking about it a lot at the moment and it’s not for nothing: Disney is not going through the best phase in its history and this new information about its Willow series is there to remind us of that. Hold on tight, the amounts are astronomical.
Willow, a failed return
HBO has its Game of Thrones, Netflix has its The Witcher, Prime Video has its Rings of Power… but Disney Plus still lacked its big Fantasy project: it was finally done with Willowambitious series and sequel to the cult film released in 1988, broadcast on the VOD platform last year.
On Metacritic, this first season has an average of 70% – which is correct – but seems to have somewhat traumatized its audience with a rating of 2.7/10 from viewers. In the end, the series was judged by Disney to be a terrible failure, pushing the firm to… remove the episodes altogether from Disney Plus. You read correctly: there is currently no legal way to view Willow. A staggering decision, especially since we have just learned that the allocated budget was more than 100 million dollars.
Wil-low
It was Forbes who stumbled upon the pot of roses by examining several official Disney documents: the entertainment giant spent 105.9 million dollars for the production of the Willow series, or more than 13 million dollars per single episode. An astronomical sum of money which corresponds to the cost of producing the final season of Game of Thrones, for comparison.
When we know that less than a year later, Willow was simply removed from the Disney Plus catalog and that you can’t even buy the series on DVD or Blu-Ray, we barely dare imagine the panic attack internally. However, you should know that this removal of the service makes sense, especially when we add it to that of other projects (Artemis Fowl, Y: The Last Man and many others have also been removed) since this would have allowed to save $1.5 billion in taxes. Yes, all the same.
We will end with the painful words of one of the writers of Willow, Jonathan Kasdan: “They gave us six months. Barely. This business has become absolutely cruel,” he said recently. This is not the first time that Disney has been accused of overloading its teams with a frantic pace of production, also when it comes to Marvel or Star Wars. Even to the point that Bob Iger, boss of the company, admitted this overdose during an interview…
