Variety has revealed that League Of Legends spinoff animated series Arcane has become a record breaking project.
In a report on Riot Games’ transmedia ambitions, Variety confirmed that the show has cost Riot a staggering $ 250 million across both seasons. That makes it the most expensive animated series ever made.
Interestingly, Variety criticized Riot for failing to deliver more beyond this project. Riot co-founder Mark Merrill had this to say to them about this:
“We’re more than comfortable with the spend it took to deliver a show that was worthy of our players’ time.”
We wanted to contextualize the scale of this project. While we hear of games that rise in development costs to the scale of $ 200 million and above, animation and TV series don’t really cost as much.
Prior to this show, the last animated series to gain fame for its staggering cost was Dreamworks’ Father of the Pride for NBC. A strange spinoff of the Siegfried and Roy live magic show, producer Jeff Katzenberg admitted that the show cost between $ 2 to 2.5 million per episode. With fifteen episodes produced for the first season, this show cost between $ 30 to 45 million in 2004.
We also chose to check a quick reference for another point of comparison. Based on the Wikipedia list of most expensive TV series, The Acolyte is currently at the top of the list for total cost, with reports of an incredibly inflated budget of $ 231 million for its one season. Now, The Acolyte cost more per episode, but based on this recent revelation, Wikipedia’s list definitely needs updating.
Part of the reason Arcane’s production costs rang so high is the unusual circumstances behind its production. The animation studio they hired for the job is Fortiche, a French studio specializing in smaller, but more expensive projects, like big budget commercials. Most animation today goes through some form of outsourcing, with Japan normalizing a business environment where they share work with each other so they can finish contracted projects quicker.
Fortiche is the kind of studio that takes longer to make their animation, and puts more details into them. They were the same studio that had been making League of Legends’ trailers for many years. So when Riot Games hired Fortiche for the job, they signed up to wait six years to get the first nine episodes, with each episode lasting over 40 minutes on average.
This kind of production is literally commercially unfeasible, and cannot be matched by other entertainment companies. We know that its high critical and fan reception and high view counts around the world could not have been enough to make back that production cost. That’s how you know that Arcane is a true labor of love, or perhaps a real artistic vision for Riot Games and Fortiche. We would love to see them make another two seasons of the show, but we don’t know how much longer they could afford to do so, and really, if the story they want to tell will really take that much longer to tell.
