“Andor” creator Tony Gilroy dropped a bombshell during a recent Q&A at the ATX Television Festival (via IndieWire): The total budget for the 24-episode “Star Wars” series was $650 million, he claimed. Released over two seasons in 2022 and 2025, “Andor” ended its run last month to critical acclaim. The series was a prequel to the 2016 film “Rogue One” (which Gilroy co-wrote) and centered on Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor, a thief turned rebel spy.
“I mean, [for] Disney this is $650 million,” Gilroy 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.”
The studio had no comment on Gilroy’s budget reveal when asked by Variety. Production on “Andor” Season 2 was notably paused amid the Hollywood strikes. A source familiar with the production said the guild strikes added approximately $20 million in shutdown costs to “Andor’s” budget and that episodes cost an estimated $20 million after tax incentives, similar to the reported episode budgets of “House of the Dragon” and “Severance.”
Gilroy pushed Disney and the “Star Wars” franchise’s boundaries with “Andor.” While he pulled back on having a character say “fuck the empire” in the first season finale, he ended up getting topics such as genocide and assault into the show’s second season without studio interference. Gilroy said at ATX that he purposefully started “Andor” with a scene set in a brothel as a litmus test for Disney.
“I worked on ‘Rogue [One]’ so I knew what the [permissible] levels of violence were, and actually the rules loosened up considerably,” Gilroy said. “Yeah, we can’t have skin, but I very consciously started the first scene in a brothel just to see what would happen and how far we could go. There’s sex. … It’s something that probably seemed at some point like it was going to be a big anxiety, and it really turned out to be a nothing-burger all the way through.”
Gilroy previously told Variety that he “wrote a legal brief” to Disney when he was trying to get the studio to allow him to say “fuck the empire” in the show, explaining: “I wrote a memo on it and said, ‘Here’s why I think it’s economically prudent, and here’s why I think it’s good.’”
“Disney wouldn’t let us use it,” director Benjamin Caron added to Variety. “So we changed it to ‘fight the empire.’ I remember having a call with Tony Gilroy saying, ‘Are we gonna get away with this?’”
The “Andor” team couldn’t get Disney to let them say “fuck the empire,” but they did get away with discussing genocide in Season 2 (Gilroy said at ATX that being able to do so was “pretty flawless”). The second season also featured Adria Arjona’s Binx openly calling out an attempted sexual assault. Bix bluntly shouts at an officer: “He tried to rape me!”
“I remember reading that, and within the truth of that moment of the abuse of power, being really scared to go into that scene,” Arjona told Variety. “But there was also something — I’m going to curse — really fucking powerful about the fact that I get to showcase this in a galaxy far, far away. The fact that Tony gave it to Bix was a big honor — and it was right. She’s in the most vulnerable state she can possibly be in, and someone tries to take advantage of her. We’ve heard that story many times.”
Both seasons of “Andor” are now streaming on Disney+.
