Will we ever get to see another show like Andor?
The streaming world of 2019 is vastly different from that of 2025
Andor comes to a close with its final block of episodes tonight, and man, I'm excited and more than a little depressed that it's over. From some of the earliest developments to the first trailer, I've been blown away by the scale of the world, the depth of the story, and the lengths that the production has gone to build up this story. I've said before that the series has delivered the serious take that I've always wanted from George Lucas's world.
I can't help but shake the feeling that it'll be the last time in a while before we see something like it, and as I began thinking about that, I realized that there's probably a good reason for that: the environment when the was pitched has drastically changed, and everything, from competition to interest rates has had an effect on how this show came together.
Looking back at this run, it's almost unbelievable that this show exists in the first place. It's a gritty, character-driven story about radicalization, revolution, and rebellion within the trappings of a massive, family-friendly franchise, and an expensive one at that. The total cost of the project is reportedly around $645 million (it's probably a bit higher), which far exceeds the budget of 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($447 million) – which happens to be the most expensive film ever made.
It's not entirely fair to put those two stories head to head when it comes to budget, however. Andor's $645 million budget is spread across 24 episodes, (about $27 million per episode), and if you think of the eight big arcs that make up both seasons, you come out with what's essentially the equivalent of eight films costing $81 million each.
That's still an astounding amount of money – $27 million per episode. I remember the waves that LOST's pilot episode made when its budget was pegged at around $14 million – the most expensive TV project to date in 2004.
In a roundabout way, you can point to the 2008 financial crisis and great recession as a factor in the era of big-budget prestige television that we've been living through, driven in part by the "streaming wars" that saw entertainment conglomerates fighting for subscriber eyeballs for their direct-to-consumer streaming platforms.
Bear with me, this gets a little wonky.
To try and stimulate the economy when the markets cratered in 2008, the Federal Reserve began cutting steadily cutting its Federal Funds interest rates (which it had held at 5.25% throughout much of 2007) from 3.5% in January all the way down to 0% to .25% by December. This rate dictates what banks charge one another, which in turn impacts what those banks will charge for anyone borrowing money from them, and lowering by lowering those rates to zero (or nearly so), the Fed hoped that it would have the effect of stimulating the economy by allowing businesses to borrow money cheaply.
The Fed kept interest rates near zero from December 2008 through November 2015. This seven year period helped fuel the enormous growth in the tech sector: those low interest rates helped fuel profits for companies and investors, giving them plenty of room to grow with new products, services, or headcounts.
We had a little discussion in the TO Slack channel about this, because the more I thought about this question, the harder it became to quantify, so I'm going to hedge a bit. I can't tell for sure if they were borrowing tons of money because interest rates were low, or if they were willing to sell lots of debt to investors just because the markets were generally favorable. That seems like a question for the folks at NPR's Planet Money. I started looking through Netflix's financial documents and I wasn't having a whole lot of luck in parsing them.
Either way: my impression (and assumption) is that both of these things are factors: because the Fed lowered interest rates, borrowing was cheaper and whether streaming companies were taking advantage of that, or if it just led to a good environment for investors, that's what helped bring about the "streaming wars", the point in time roughly between the point in time when Netflix began debuting original content on its platform starting with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black and up to around 2022 when Netflix started reporting drops in its subscriber base.
Original content has been the carrot for the massive growth of those streaming companies. While Netflix and Hulu had been the go-to places where you could watch whatever you wanted, they found that the way to really incentivize people to come over to your pool of content was to offer up stuff that you couldn't find elsewhere, because it was locked to that platform. And thus, you saw these companies pour billions and billions of dollars into funding original movies and shows, sometimes at ridiculous budgets. To quote John Hammond from Jurassic Park: "We spared no expense."
The heyday of the streaming wars brought about some wild experiments: AMC launched a dedicated horror streaming service called Shudder in 2015 (which is still running), MGM launched the franchise-dedicated Stargate Command in 2017 (which contained the entire catalog of Stargate shows, complete with its own original series Stargate Origins) while Warner Brothers built DC Universe, which included a range of adaptations from the company's IP, comics to read, and a slew of original animated and live action shows for subscribers.
As other companies like Apple, Disney, NBC, and Warner Bros. put together their own streaming platforms, you saw them invest a lot of money in this original content, which resulted in shows like Netflix's 3 Body Problem ($20 million an episode) and Stranger Things ($30 million an episode), Amazon Prime's Rings of Power (a reported $465 million for the first season – more than $1 billion for the series thus far), Apple's Severance ($200 million for season 2), and Disney's Star Wars: The Acolyte ($180 million for one season), and the aforementioned Star Wars: Andor ($645 million for two seasons).
All of that isn't counting the tons of other shows that all of those streaming platforms put into production and released: 2021 and 2022 saw a peak of more than 600 shows on the air, which dropped quite a bit in 2023 and 2024. When you're flush with cash, studios were clearly willing to spend it, either on making those huge shows look really good, or just to experiment and see what they could come up with. SNL had a funny take on this in 2018.
When Netflix reported its first losses in more than a decade, it led to a cascade of changes in the streaming world. Warner Bros. Discovery made incredible, painful cuts by cutting down completed films, while other streamers canceled shows, rejiggered budgets for existing ones, or canceled shows well in development, while also raising prices and introducing ad-supported tiers. And on top of that, interest rates have been going back up – we're back up to 4.25-4.5%, so money is getting a bit more expensive to borrow. (And, on top of that, threats of tariffs for productions outside of the US.)
I think the revelation showed investors that these companies were chasing after a fixed number of eyeballs and that years of virtually unlimited spending was enough of an enticement: they now had to use those subscriber bases to make those investments worthwhile.
From the looks of things, streaming companies are still spending quite a bit, but it looks like that rate is starting to slow. They're still spending a lot – Disney is on track to burn through $24 billion on content in 2025 (but only up slightly from $23.4 billion last year), while Netflix will spend $18 billion in 2025 (up from $16.2 billion in 2024.)
Business Insider points out that at these insane numbers, an increased couple of percentage points really aren't going to make a huge difference to Netflix and Disney: "If the company added another, say, $2.0 billion in debt over the next year and interest rates were 1% higher than otherwise would be the case, that estimated 1% higher interest rate adds only an incremental $20 million in extra interest costs. Netflix is a company that should have $2.0+ billion in EBITDA this year so $20 million in higher interest expense on new debt due to higher rates is a rounding error."
While that doesn't exactly line up with my theory that low interest rates fueled this boom in content, I do think that that era of low rates played a role by making it conducive for companies to embark on setting up the infrastructure and audience development for this entirely new segment of the entertainment industry. These companies are still spending a lot of money, but we're now out of the "we have money, let's see what works" phase and aren't feeling our way around in the dark.
Thus, we won't see the rise of those zany streaming platforms like Stargate Command, storytelling experiments, and if my suspicions about the next couple of years for Star Wars are correct, more of an emphasis on safer bets than riskier ones. I get it, but I think it's a bit of a shame: experimentation and risk-taking is where you'll find the unexpected stories and characters that go on to become classics, technologies that end up becoming an integral part of an industry, or the writers and personnel who'll be telling the next generation of stories.
Speaking to Empire Magazine last month, Andor creator Tony Gilroy said that the existence of The Mandalorian helped ensure his show's existence: it "gave us the platform to jump off. Their success is what would fuel the whole thing. I mean, no Baby Yoda, no Andor." Furthermore, he noted that "no-one’s ever gonna start a show on this scale again, and shoot it practically, and have the resources and the protection to do something like this," explaining that they had a lot of faith from Lucasfilm and Disney leaders that "protected" the project.
Even so, Andor was cut down from an initial concept of five seasons down to two because of the "monumental size of the show, the effort, and everything else was just dawning on us," Gilroy told SFX Magazine in April. "We realized that I didn't have enough calories to do it, and Diego's face couldn't take the timing, because it just takes too long to make it. We were saved by Disney saying, 'Okay, if you guys can figure out a way to do it, we're into it.'"
I have a feeling that the decision was less about Diego Luna getting older and more Gilroy, Lucasfilm, and Disney recognizing that the environment that helped conceive Andor just doesn't exist in 2025. Disney's Bob Iger recently noted that his company had made a bit too much content in their scramble into the streaming market and that quality dropped as a result. A report in the Wall Street Journal backed that up, noting that Marvel was particularly affected here, as studio head Kevin Feige found himself stretched too thin across the increase in shows that they company put into production.
Andrew Liptak
This has all been a roundabout way of saying: I wonder if that means we've seen the last of really ambitious projects like Andor or The Acolyte, which were both ambitious in intent, production, and scale.
It's clear that Andor is something altogether different from anything that's been released in the franchise, and I while I'll cop to being a huge fanboy for this show, there are few genre shows that are hitting on the same level: I'm certain that it'll be held up alongside other classics like Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, or The Expanse. It's a show with real substance, one that has taken significant risks with its storytelling and subject matter, and which went to huge lengths to put the world into the camera frame, eschewing tools like The Volume in favor of building massive sets and going out on location. And above all, it's a rare franchise project that feels like it actually advances the world rather than fills it in.
Andor's been a critical hit, but it's been a bit of a slow burn with audiences. As studios – and Disney rein in (or at least slow down) their spending, will they be willing to a) take a risk on a show like Andor in the first place, or 2) invest as much money as they have if they do?
I have a feeling that the case for such a show is much, much harder in 2025 than it was in 2019. I don't think it's an accident that the next new Star Wars film in theaters is going to be a continuation of a show that was a massive hit – The Mandalorian, because the need for a huge box office win is so crucial.
But on the other hand, maybe the quality of the show and the critical acclaim that came with Andor will serve as an example of how taking the time and effort to really craft a series that pays off. Cable channels like HBO have shown that quality is something that will pay off in the long-term: look at how many of their shows remain enormously popular because they put in the work to make them as good as they can be, while Netflix's throw-cash-at-the-wall strategy means a lot of content, but how much of it will be remembered in 10, 15, or 20 years from now? For every Stranger Things, you get a lot more of Electric States.
Will we see another Andor from Disney? I doubt it, at least not one with the same scale and ambition. I think Andor had all the right things converge–the right creators and writers, actors, production, budget, and industry timing–to create a show like this. Maybe we'll get something similar, but maybe with a lower budget, or maybe with not quite as much risk when it comes to message or story. I hope I'm wrong, because it's these types of shows that'll inspire the next generations of fans and storytellers.
While I'm thinking about this, let me see if I can manifest something into reality: if Disney really wants to capitalize on the success that it's had with Andor, there's a perfect story just waiting to be told: take advantage of Genevieve O'Reilly and follow Mon Mothma as she leads the Rebellion after Yavin, and all of the challenges that you'd have building and holding together the Rebel Alliance as it fights against the Empire.
There are some really cool stories in the world like the Battle of Derra IV, the aftermath of the Battle of Hoth, and of course, Mothma's line in Return of the Jedi: "many Bothan died to bring us this information." All of that is enormously rich ground for a successor to Andor. Tony Gilroy might be ready to move on from Star Wars, but you've got Beau Willimon or Dan Gilroy or Stephen Schiff or Tom Bissell out there.