Disney spent over $100 million making WILLOW and it was a wasted opportunity

Resuscitate Willow as a sequel series was a really great idea, which should have been great and successful. Unfortunately, the project was poorly executed and proved to be a disappointment for many fans. It was a big bummer because being a huge fan of the original movie I was so excited about the show and hyped the hell out of it! Then we got what we got and I wondered how the creative team could screw up the story so much. It’s a shame.

Until recently, we didn’t know exactly what the budget for the show was, but in some financial statements presented by Disney and compiled 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 escalated to $15 million by the time the eighth season arrived. $13 million is a lot of money, and you don’t really see it on screen.

After spending all that money on the series, Disney canceled it and then removed the entire 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. Ultimately, that’s what the Willow sequel series has become, a tax write-off.

The franchise deserved better! Perhaps they should have taken that money and just developed a feature film where they could have made a large sum of money at the box office. They definitely needed someone else to lead the creative charge on the series because Jonathan Kasdan I just couldn’t make a great and compelling fantasy story.

He had previously explained that he was trying 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’ve said before: “I just think maybe they’ve gone too far in making it ‘contemporary with this moment.’ That was the thing that got me off.

Whether or not the series was canceled and removed from Disney+, Kasdan denied it and said that the series was not canceled and Volume II was in the planning stages. When he explained that reports of the show’s cancellation were exaggerated. He explained:

“A decision was made last week to release our core cast for other series opportunities that may present themselves for them in the coming year. With all of TV and movies in production around the world, it seems unfair to limit the availability of one actor with no clear sense of when you’ll need them again.It’s further trivialized by the simple reality that the scripts we’ve been working on require just as many actors with whom there is no such contractual link.

The showrunner also shared his hopes that Volume II delivers a “fun, richer, darker, 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 in the process of being canceled that have been greenlit for the new season!

In the end, it’s a shame to see Disney spending over $100 million on a series that had the potential to be a great show that fans would embrace and love like the original. Instead, the opportunity was wasted.