Disney Spent Over $100 Million on Making WILLOW and it Was a Wasted Opportunity
Reviving Willow as a sequel series was seriously a great idea, one that should’ve been great and successful. Unfortunately, the project was poorly executed and ended up being a disappointment for a lot of fans. It was a big bummer because as a massive fan of the original film, I was so excited about the show and I hyped the hell out of it! Then we got what we got and I was left wondering how the creative team could mess up the story so badly. It’s a shame.
Until recently, we didn’t know what exactly the budget for the show was, but in some financial statements filed by Disney, and picked up by Forbes' Caroline Reid, we now know that the budget for the show was $105.9 million, which means they spent more than $13 million per episode.
Just to give you a little comparison, when Game of Thrones first started HBO was spending $6 million per episode. That rose to $15 million by the time the eighth season rolled around. $13 million is a lot of money, and you don’t really see it on screen.
After spending all of that money on the series, Disney canceled it and then removed the whole first season from their streaming platform so no one can watch it! I assume they made that move to write it off for tax purposes. In the end, that’s what this Willow sequel series ended up being, a tax write-off.
The franchise deserved better! Maybe they should’ve taken that money and just developed a feature film where they might have earned a big chunk of money at the box office. They definitely needed someone else to lead the charge on the series creatively because Jonathan Kasdan just wasn’t able to pull off a great and engaging fantasy story.
He previously explained that he was looking to make the show feel fresh and unexpected, saying they wanted to do something that was contemporary to this moment, and that just didn’t work. As I previously said: “I just think that maybe they leaned too far into making it feel ‘contemporary to this moment.’ That was the thing that pulled me out.”
Regardless of the series being canceled and removed from Disney+, Kasdan was in denial and said that the series had not been canceled and that Volume II was being planned. When explaining that the reports of the show's cancellation were exaggerated. He explained:
"A decision was made last week to release our main cast for other series opportunities that may arise for them in the coming year. With all the TV and movies in production around the world, it feels unfair to limit an actor's availability without a clear sense of when you're going to need them again. It's further trivialised by the simple reality that the scripts we've been working on require just as many actors with whom no such contractual hold exists."
The showrunner also shared his hopes that Volume II would deliver a “brain-melting fun, richer, darker and better” story.
With the Hollywood strikes still in full swing, I think it’s safe to say that the series is officially dead. There are projects being canceled that had new season greenlights!
In the end, it’s just a shame to see Disney spend over $100 million dollars on a series that had the potential to be an awesome show that fans would embrace and love like the original. Instead, the opportunity was wasted.