ARCANE Showrunner Talks About Its Risky $250 Million Budget and How It Was Worth It
Arcane’s $250 million budget has been a hot topic of conversation over the past couple of weeks as it makes the project the most expensive animated series ever made.
While some people think it’s crazy that the series cost that much, in my opinion, you can see every penny of that budget in the series. This is seriously one of the best shows on TV, and it’s reaping the rewards of the big risks that it took.
When talking about the risks this show took, showrunner Christian Linke says while the budget is "high", he thinks the risk was worth it.
"I think one of the hard things about the creative world is that if you do risky things or things that make people raise their eyebrows, if you stick the landing you're a genius visionary. If you don't stick the landing, you're an idiot. And there's really no way around it."
Well, Arcane definitely stuck the landing! Everyone who has watched this show has loved it. Linke goes on to explain:
"There was a book called Loonshots. It talks about how easy it is to doubt, how cheap it is to doubt, because success is unlikely. If it fails, you're right, and it was an easy investment for you. If you're wrong after not believing in it, then, hey, you know, it was unlikely. It's just cheap to doubt."
He added: "You expose yourself when you take big risks, and people will attack you. People will question you. It's not so much that I feel vindicated. It's just that I think it is nice to see that we didn't waste people's money.
“I think that's the only way to really put it. We're not doing it to be megalomaniacs. We really just have always dreamt of the quality of animation we see in movies. We want to see that in serialized content and animation. It really only just started from there, because we love animation."
Whatever it took to get this series made, I’m happy that it exists. I’m happy that the creative team got to tell this incredibly awesome, heartbreaking, and powerful story in the way that they did.