'Andor' Showrunner Implies Disney Has Run Out Of Cash, Says Company Told Him "Streaming Is Dead"

Jun 02, 2025

Tony Gilroy, the showrunner for Andor, implied that The Walt Disney Company has run out of funds for its expensive Disney+ streaming shows.

While promoting the show that was originally conceived as a five season show and was subsequently cut down to just two seasons, Gilroy claimed Lucasfilm executives informed him that “Streaming is dead.”

IndieWire reports that during an appearance at the ATX Television festival. Gilroy was asked about including the word “genocide” in the show and if he thought carefully about using it. He responded, “Ultimately, yes.”

When pressed by Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk, who moderated the panel, to elaborate on the decision to include the word, Gilroy replied, “Pretty effortless.”

After being even further pressed he shared, “It’s really sad how many people can find a place to put this [word] in some place that’s meaningful for them. And, you know, I’ve been allowed to start using the word ‘fascism’ the last couple weeks. That’s liberating. But I don’t think it should be any surprise or even be too slippery or complicated for people to understand the road I have to walk to do all this; to maximize the audience and protect the investment of a really brave [company.]”

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From there, he revealed that Lucasfilm and Disney spent $650 million on the two seasons of the show, “I mean, [for] Disney this is $650 million. For 24 episodes, I never took a note. We said ‘F**k 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.”

“But it is sad how many people can find a place to put ‘genocide’ into their vocabulary,” he concluded. “I don’t think you need me to say anything else, do you?”

These comments regarding the show’s budget come in the wake of him revealing they axed a K2 horror episode due to budget constraints. He told Entertainment Weekly, “Dan Gilroy wrote an amazing, entirely self-contained episode that was episode 209. It was an amazing episode that was like a horror movie. It was the K2 story. They had to bring this huge ugly tanker ship to Yavin, and there was a KX unit that was trapped inside there hunting. It was sort of like a monster movie with K2 on it. It was really cool.”

While the episode was written, Gilroy revealed why it was never made, “We could not afford to do it. It was made clear that it was out of the range, so we had to abandon that and consolidate things.”

Gilroy would go on to reveal this was not the first time something was cut due to budget constraints, “It’s like what we did with Aldhani. Danny got burned twice. Danny wrote the Aldhani episode pre-Covid where there were 2,000 people in Aldhani. It was like Glastonbury, this huge festival. And then by the time we got there [after Covid] they said, ‘Well, you'd be happy if you get 150 people there.' We were like, ‘Oh my God, we have to change the whole story!’ Everything had to change.”

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Gilroy would go on to reveal just how much costs were cut, “By the time we got to season 2, and Bob [Iger] came back, everything had changed and everybody was belt-tightening. It's hard to ask for more money when they're laying people off at Disney, and we were like, ‘Wow, man. Well, we built half an aircraft carrier. We'd like to finish it.’”

“We made as many concessions as we could, but it was still a huge gamble on their part to keep going and still a huge ask,” Gilroy said. “So thank you, Disney, and thank you Lucasfilm. It was lot of tough conversations and a lot of anxiety, but really, in the end, they really backed our play.”

As previously noted, Andor was originally supposed to be five seasons, but was eventually cut down to just two. Adriano Goldman, who was the Director of Photography revealed back in April 2022, “The series I worked on [Andor] was supposed to be 5 seasons long, but I think it’s not happening, it will have 3 [seasons] maybe.”

Gilroy confirmed this a month later at Star Wars Celebration, “Originally we thought ‘oh, maybe we’ll do five seasons’, but it’s just the scale of the show.”

He added, “I think when the show comes out everybody will forgive us for not doing that. The show is huge and it’s just physically impossible. So then we were like ‘what are we going to do?’ And then the answer turned out to be incredibly elegant and perfect because we knew where we wanted to go. Every now and then you get really lucky and the solution turned out to be really fortunate for us.”

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Following the show’s first season, Gilroy admitted the show was chasing the audience. He told Variety, “I think I was surprised. I thought the show would go the other way, that we would have this gigantic, instantaneous audience that would just be everywhere, but that it would take forever for non-‘Star Wars’ people or critics or my cohort of friends to get involved in the show.”

“The opposite happened. We ended up with all this critical praise, all this deep appreciation and understanding from really surprising number of sources, and we’re chasing the audience,” he admitted.

The Andor Season 1 finale only attracted 674 million minutes the week it premiered in November 2022 according to Nielsen.

The show’s viewership did not increase, but seemingly fell off from the first season. Nielsen reports that the show only attracted 821 million minutes watched for the week of April 28th though May 4th when the show premiered episodes four, five, and six of Season 2. That’s an average of just 4.7 million viewers if you divide the total minutes viewed by the three episodes’ run time. In contrast, the season finale seemingly attracted 11.8 million viewers.