Andor creator Tony Gilroy continued to reveal just how much Lucasfilm is struggling with Star Wars as he admitted that he had to axe a K2 horror episode due to budget constraints.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Gilroy shared, “Dan Gilroy wrote an amazing, entirely self-contained episode that was episode 209. It was an amazing episode that was like a horror movie.”
“It was the K2 story,” he elaborated. “They had to bring this huge ugly tanker ship to Yavin, and there was a KX unit that was trapped inside there hunting. It was sort of like a monster movie with K2 on it. It was really cool.”
While the episode was seemingly written, it never got made. Gilroy explained, “We could not afford to do it.”
“It was made clear that it was out of the range, so we had to abandon that and consolidate things,” he added.
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He also admitted this was not the first time something was cut due to the show’s budget. He revealed, “It’s like what we did with Aldhani. Danny got burned twice. Danny wrote the Aldhani episode pre-Covid where there were 2,000 people in Aldhani. It was like Glastonbury, this huge festival. And then by the time we got there [after Covid] they said, ‘Well, you'd be happy if you get 150 people there.' We were like, ‘Oh my God, we have to change the whole story!’ Everything had to change.”
In fact, Gilroy went on to reveal how much Lucasfilm and The Walt Disney Company cut costs for the show, “By the time we got to season 2, and Bob [Iger] came back, everything had changed and everybody was belt-tightening. It's hard to ask for more money when they're laying people off at Disney, and we were like, ‘Wow, man. Well, we built half an aircraft carrier. We'd like to finish it.’”
“We made as many concessions as we could, but it was still a huge gamble on their part to keep going and still a huge ask,” Gilroy said. “So thank you, Disney, and thank you Lucasfilm. It was lot of tough conversations and a lot of anxiety, but really, in the end, they really backed our play.”
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Andor was originally supposed to be five seasons, but was eventually cut down to just two. Adriano Goldman, who was the Director of Photography revealed back in April 2022, “The series I worked on [Andor] was supposed to be 5 seasons long, but I think it’s not happening, it will have 3 [seasons] maybe.”
Gilroy confirmed this a month later at Star Wars Celebration, “Originally we thought ‘oh, maybe we’ll do five seasons’, but it’s just the scale of the show.”
He added, “I think when the show comes out everybody will forgive us for not doing that. The show is huge and it’s just physically impossible. So then we were like ‘what are we going to do?’ And then the answer turned out to be incredibly elegant and perfect because we knew where we wanted to go. Every now and then you get really lucky and the solution turned out to be really fortunate for us.”
Following the show’s first season, Gilroy admitted the show was chasing the audience. He told Variety, “I think I was surprised. I thought the show would go the other way, that we would have this gigantic, instantaneous audience that would just be everywhere, but that it would take forever for non-‘Star Wars’ people or critics or my cohort of friends to get involved in the show.”
“The opposite happened. We ended up with all this critical praise, all this deep appreciation and understanding from really surprising number of sources, and we’re chasing the audience,” he admitted.
The Andor Season 1 finale only attracted 674 million minutes the week it premiered in November 2022 according to Nielsen.
While Nielsen has not released any Season 2 data yet, its competitor Luminate noted that the release of three-episodes on April 29th only garnered 481.3 million minutes.
The show failed to chart the week it had a three-episode premiere.
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As a point of comparison, the Season 1 finale was just a single episode that had a runtime of 57 minutes. If you assume all of the viewership is from that single episode, the Season 1 finale attracted 11.8 million viewers.
In contrast, the three-episode second week only attracted a total of 2.7 million viewers. That’s a decline of 77%. It shows just how much Star Wars has declined in just the three years since Andor Season 1 released, and there does not appear to be any break in the downward decline whatsoever.
What do you make of Gilroy admitting an entire episode was cut due to budget constraints?
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If only the entire show was cut.
Budget Constraints; they had $650 million to produce a good looking, but glacier-slow program!