Is Severance More Expensive Than House of the Dragon Now? Budgets Compared
Yes, Severance has like three locations, and yet the budget is just huge.
It's hard to believe, but Severance is approaching House of the Dragon in terms of production values.
House of the Dragon Budget Per Episode
The Game of Thrones spinoff is obviously a very expensive project — each episode costs around $20 million. The total budget for the first season was around $200 million, with another $100 million allocated for marketing.
In that regard, the prequel has already surpassed Game of Thrones. Even in its most expensive and large-scale eighth season, each episode cost about $15 million, and in the first season — $6 million.
Severance Season 2 Budget Per Episode
According to Bloomberg, one episode of the second season of Severance costs about $20 million, and the next chapter of the Apple TV+ series will have 10 episodes. In total, about $200 million was invested in the production of the season. Details about the cost of Season 1 are not disclosed, but it is known that it was cheaper.
Severance is a rather modest series in terms of the number of locations. Most likely, the budget was inflated due to the long production time — the work on Season 2 was suspended due to last year's Hollywood strikes.
Thus, Severance is very close to House of the Dragon, but barely exceeds it in terms of budget — while the first season of the project about Targaryens had a budget of $20 million per episode, Severance did not reach that level until its second season. In addition, House of the Dragon not only boasts an impressive marketing budget, but the largest of any series in history.
Severance Is Apple's Most Successful Series
Apple's desire to invest in Severance is understandable. After all, it is one of the most popular projects on the streaming (and rightfully so). However, Apple's overall situation is not too positive to spend such large sums. Many insiders report that the company wants to seriously cut costs because streaming has a problem with views. Bloomberg claims that Apple TV+ gets fewer views in a month than Netflix does in a day.
The most disappointing part of the situation is that percentage-wise, Apple is delivering far more quality material than Netflix. So go and check out some Apple TV projects.
Source: Bloomberg