Someone At Disney Told Tony Gilroy Streaming Is Dead – They Were Right

Someone at Disney told Andor creator Tony Gilroy that ‘streaming is dead’ and the truth is, they were right. I cannot see us ever getting another Andor again, not with that budget. Though, the truth is, inflating budgets is what killed streaming in the first place. Andor is one of thew few shows where you look at the final product and say, money well spent. We’ll have Andor in another 30 years for a new generation to marvel over. However, a lot of money has also been spent on some absolutley awful TV in this short era of the streaming wars.

Talking at the ATX Television Festival, via IndieWire, Gilroy said,

“I mean, [for] Disney this is $650 million,” he said. “For 24 episodes, I never took a note. We said ‘Fuck the Empire’ in the first season, and they said, ‘Can you please not do that?’ … In Season 2, they said, ‘Streaming is dead, we don’t have the money we had before,’ so we fought hard about money, but they never cleaned anything up. That [freedom] comes with responsibilities.”

RELATED: Disappointing News As The Wheel Of Time Cancelled At Amazon After Three Seasons

If Andor had come along a few years later than it did, it would have never been made. It all began when everyone began noticing how much money the likes of Netflix were making off Stranger Things and HBO were making off Game of Thrones. So, every single studio then decided, not to make shows for other streaming platforms, but have their own. They all spent big to launch their networks with varying degrees of success. Disney saw Marvel shows help Netflix and thought, ‘wait a minute’. Paramount started thinking, ‘why are we selling Star Trek shows to Netflix/Amazon when we could have our own?’ However, they reacted far too late and were also guilty of rushing out big name shows with poor writing (Picard S1 and 2 for example)

The Big Spend & The Incoming Slash

Thus the studios began offering budgets that were unsustainable and gambling it on untested writers. Look at how much money Amazon spent on rights to Lord of the Rings, only to let two amateurs showrun their flagship series. Disney spending Avengers movie budgets on poorly received slop like Secret Invasion. Now it seems streamers have realised they were haemorrhaging money and gaining no new followers to make up the difference.

Ultimately, I believe eventually we will end up with only three major streamers, Netflix, Amazon and Disney. Even then, the experience is basically just what used to exists on cable TV. You pay, but you also have to watch adverts. In other words we are being charged a premium fee just as the studios are slashing costs. So by the end, we’re going to be left paying massive prices for streaming and getting cable era quality TV. The studios always win, and the product always gets worse. The studios will now make their money back on subscribers that they spent to get them in, buy reducing the quality and keeping the fees the same.

It’s now better to just wait for shows to finish you fancy, subscribe to a streamer for a month and drop it again. There’s simply not enough content on a weekly basis to truly make of of them worthwhile.

Apple TV And Death Of Fantasy

The one studio, still offering in my opinion a premium product is Apple TV. However, that doesn’t make any money for them either. Realistically, they’d make more money selling their shows to one of the big three. Though, I do think Apple’s model is less about profit from the studio, more about selling hardware. Maybe I’m wrong about them eventually disappearing? I hope so, they are currently the best in this TV critic’s opinions.

The golden age of fantasy (not so much) was seriously mishandled. In fact, it has probably set the genre back to pre-LOTR movies level. Netflix ruined The Witcher, Amazon ruined Lord of the Rings and fumbled Wheel of Time. Disney tried to erase Willow from history it was so bad. Even HBO made mistakes on House of the Dragon‘s second season which hurt the show. There’s no budget left to do any of these franchises justice, or it’s simply too late.

Star Wars TV Dead?

The point I’m making is, we should cherish Andor. It arrived at the only time it could have. Of all these expensive projects, Andor actually delivered, a rare example. We are left with an almost perfect 2 seasons of TV which is probably the best Star Wars has EVER been.

It now seems the future of Star Wars live-action TV is on a shaky nail. Ahsoka Season 2 is still coming. However, season 1 felt like a cartoon level plot, so I’m not sure making it live-action helped anyone. I’ll be surprised if we get an Ahsoka Season 3, or a Mandalorian Season 4 ever. Disney is looking to bring Star Wars back to movie screens, where the budgets make more sense. I imagine animation will be the future of Star Wars on Disney+. Whilst I understand Star Wars can’t look awful, Lucasfilm should be finding writers with pitches that are smaller scale.

I guess we will finds out eventually. However, I used to subscribe per year for Disney+. I have already cancelled and run out next March. From that point on, I’ll be subscribing on a month by month basis, only if there’s something I’m interested in.

So folks, someone at Disney told Andor creator Tony Gilroy that streaming is dead, for me, they were right. What about you, is streaming dead? Which streamers, if any do you believe still offer value for money? Thoughts below.

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