Netflix's Arcane is the most expensive animated show ever made – with a reported $250 million price tag
Nov. 6, 2024Season 2 arrives this month
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Arcane, the Netflix animated League of Legends spin-off series, is the most expensive animated show ever made, according to a new report byVariety.
The show’s 18 episodes reportedly cost a total of $250 million to make and promote. League of Legends developer Riot Games, who also produced Arcane, declined to confirm this figure, but told Variety, “We’re more than comfortable with the spend it took to deliver a show that was worthy of our players' time.” Production on season 1 is said to have cost around $80 million, with season 2 setting the studio back nearly $100 million. Riot also reportedly spent $60 million of its own money on promotion for season 1, on top of what was spent by Netflix.
“Our ambitions in entertainment haven’t changed,” Riot co-founder Marc Merrill told Variety. “We were never intending to operate like a traditional studio with traditional timelines. What did change as we learned more was our expectations of ourselves: We realized that getting it right takes a lot more time than we’d originally expected, and so we recalibrated our development, output goals and teams with that in mind.”
The show follows Jinx (Fallout’s Ella Purnell) and Vi (Hawkeye’s Hailee Steinfeld), two sisters who find themselves on opposite sides of an escalating conflict between the utopian city of Piltover and Zaun, its oppressed underbelly.
Arcane season 2 act 1 arrives on Netflix on November 9. Check out ourArcane season 2 release schedulefor more information on when the rest of the new episodes drop, or fill out your watchlist with our picks of the otherbest Netflix shows.
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I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism.
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