With a $15 Mil Budget per Episode, is Andor a Flop Already?

It is been 10 years since Disney acquired Lucasfilm from George Lucas in a $4 billion deal, a decision that was called "one of the smartest acquisitions in history". Four Star Wars feature films alone have grossed almost $5 billion at the box office, not to count the Star Wars Lands theme parks, merchandise sales and licensing agreements. But while Disney doesn't suffer from Star Wars financially, the company has struggled to advance creatively since the success of the Mandalorian in 2019. Spin-off series like The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi seemed forced and were criticized by fans for breaking the canon.

So stakes were high for the latest show in the Star Wars universe, Andor. Andor tells a more personal story of the Rebel Alliance and the life of freedom fighters after the victory against the Galactic Empire. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Cassian Andor, it shows the human costs of the never-ending war.

The show has a dashing cost of approximately $15-25 million per episode, similar to The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi. But what other shows used on CGI, Andor creators spent on filming on location around the world, for example, in Scottish Highlands. It is one of the reasons Andor's visuals feel so natural, so realistic. The show is clever, it's well written and it gets the praise of the fans and the critics alike. And still that is not enough.

Andor has an amazing 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Guardian calls it the best Star Wars show since The Mandalorian and "one of the smarter shows in the galaxy". The Polygon confirms: Andor is one of the greats calling the series "a damn gorgeous spectacle." True Star Wars fans cannot agree more: "Andor is the best live-action Star Wars show to date, easily," "I'm blown away by how much more cinematic and movie-like Andor looks compared to the last 2 D+ Star Wars series."

Unfortunately, that praise doesn't transform into viewing numbers at all. Andor is performing significantly worse than any of Disney's Star Wars series by far, despite being acknowledged as the best among them all. Heartbreaking, but as one Reddit user put it, "when you spend 10 years destroying an entire franchise it's hard to get people to care again."

The good news is: Andor is not going anywhere. Disney is certainly not losing money on Star Wars, and the second season has already been ordered and is in production now. But the whole future of intelligent and well-written sci-fi is at stake. If Andor doesn't show better numbers it would be hard to convince big studious on investing in clever big-budget shows again. And that will be truly heartbreaking.