Quote Originally Posted by Mordar View Post
Always hard to pin down actual production budgets...but rumor says Minus One came in around $15M. There are a number of animated films out of Japan that are said to be in the $30M+ range. The point was more one of "you can do it cheaper than you are" rather than "you can do it for the same price as G-1". Instead of $275M for Solo, could you find a way to do it for $175M? TG: Maverick was done for ~$175 and involved a megastar, a few middle stars, and a lot of practical effects.
The point I was making is that Godzilla Minus One is a very bad example of trying to do things cheaper in Hollywood, since it's not a Hollywood production, which all Star Wars productions are. That's why I mentioned a different film, The Creator, as a more appropriate example. Likewise, Solo is a bad example for comparison to other blockbusters. Solo was effectively two films, one of which got broadly scraped. It's more like a $175 million dollar film that had a $100 million dollar write-off added to its budget.

Star Wars production costs are high, space has high costs, that's just the way it is. Cost control could certainly help, but there's not cheap Star Wars live action TV or films. It's just not happening. It's possible to make a 'small' Star Wars film for $100 million, maybe (keep in mind that Oppenheimer, a movie that is primarily composed of shots of people in small rooms talking, cost $100 million), but it's not possible to make a $20 million Star Wars indie.

And it's not likely Disney isn't aware of these costs or that they haven't taken steps to control them. The Volume, the giant screen technology that they've used in place of green screen, is a major cost-saving measure since it allows them to shoot these things on soundstages and have them look like they're in real environments without doing costly location shoots - Ahsoka was filmed pretty much entirely on a sound stage in LA. Unfortunately, this technology also seems to front-load the writing process in certain ways and may have contributed to writing issues in more recent series by imposing certain production inflexibilities. I suspect Disney/Lucasfilm hasn't quite figured out how to organize production using this technology yet, especially with their head creative Dave Filoni being massively overcommitted, and they need to restructure some things.

It's also worth noting that one reason to 'go big' and to use existing, well-recognized elements is that it can cut costs on the marketing side and reduce the work needed to bring in an audience. Obi-Wan, for example, has millions of free marketing attached to it because of the title alone, for better or worse. Meanwhile, no one has any idea what The Acolyte is even about (and the trailer didn't help). Star Wars has a long history of doing this, and its the kind of reason why to bother with pre-existing IP at all. However, this can make it hard to reduce story scope. Characters like Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker show up for big events. Heck, even a character like Bo-Katan Kryze can't be expected to get off her throne for less than the fate of a planet. In order to go small and character-focused, it requires both a character who can reliably go small and one who has an audience they can bring along for the ride.

That's a difficult match up. It can be done, as witnessed by the ongoing comics career of one Dr. Chelli Lona Aphra (80 issues and counting), but it's not easy, and the risks at the TV scale are huge. I mean, Disney absolutely tried this with Book of Boba Fett, and it sure seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, it didn't work, and Disney seems rather reasonably gun-shy about taking those kind of bets right now.