Willow, the series trashed by Disney +, cost 100 million dollars!
That’s more than 13 million per episode…
Last May, Disney Plus announced to everyone’s surprise that it was withdrawing the series Willow from its catalog. An abrupt decision, taken a few months after the launch of the sequel to the 1988 cult film, recovered by Disney as part of the acquisition of LucasFilm in 2012, for 4 billion dollars. “They left us six months. Barely. This business has become absolutely cruel“, railed on Twitter a screenwriter of the show developed by Jonathan Kasdan, the son of the emblematic screenwriter of LucasFilm Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Raiders of the Lost Ark…).
This choice may surprise when Disney had not skimped on the means to produce the series Willow. According to official documents from the company and reviewed by Forbes, 105.9 million dollars have been invested in the project. It represents more than 13 million per episode, the same budget as the final season of Game Of Thrones. This did not prevent Disney from purely and simply removing the series from its streaming platform. Today, it is impossible to see Willow legally, since it has not been released on DVD or Blu-Ray either.
From a financial point of view, sacrificing Willow is however consistent. The thirty films and series deleted (including Y: The Last Man, Turner & Hooch, Artemis Fowl…) saved Disney $1.5 billion in taxes. As Forbes recalls, Willow was also a victim of its low audience figures. According to Samba TV, only 480,000 households had watched the show when it was launched, almost 6 times less than Lokithe flagship program of Disney Plus.
