After the pandemic gold rush, streaming giants have cut their budgets and slashed their output, leaving us to pay the price From left: Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things; Crater on Disney+, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas in Citadel Morfydd Clark in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime At the end of this month, the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will launch on Amazon Prime Video. This comes two years after the first, infamously the most expensive season of television ever produced, with reports placing the budget somewhere between $715m and $1bn for eight episodes. However, the streaming landscape looks very different now.
To quote the opening of The Lord of the Rings : “The world is changed.” In hindsight, the first season of The Rings of Power was among the last gasps of the streaming boom. Much has been written about the absurd amounts of money thrown around in this gold rush.
Netflix spent $55m on Conquest , a series that never produced a single finished episode. Disney routinely burnt $25m per episode on its streaming Marvel and Star Wars shows. In 2022, the fourth season of Stranger Things reportedly cost Netflix $30m an episode.
At the time, studios could almost rationalise this spending. The pandemic and lockdowns had driven streaming subscriptions, and media companies assumed this level of growth could be maintained. There was also a push from legacy studios such as Warner Bros and Disney to catch Netflix no matter th.