Game of Thrones is an expensive show, and not just because the cost of doing a proper sword-and-sorcery show is steep, but because of the choices the production has made from the get-go. The production doesn’t film everything on a backlot against greenscreens and then render Westeros later—it films on location all over Europe, as far north as Iceland (beyond the Wall) and as far south as Malta (Illyrio Mopatis’ manse in Season 1). The cast is enormous, and every year the battle sequences seem to get bigger, with this upcoming season promising the biggest one yet. And as the fantastical creatures like direwolves and dragons grow in size, the amount of CGI required to make them believable becomes greater.
Because Game of Thrones is always working to top itself, the budget keeps growing. Thanks to a throwaway line in an print-only Entertainment Weekly article last week, we learned how much. “The show easily costs north of $10 million per episode at this point — not that you’ll hear HBO complain.” At 10 episodes per season, that means each year costs $100 million.
Tech Insider, which has been tracking the cost per episode of the show for the last few years, notes that this is a huge jump over its previous estimates. In Season 2, the show purportedly cost around $6 million per episode. Ten million dollars was how much HBO spent on Rome, the lavish series that preceded Game of Thrones. That show starred actors who would go on to be on Thrones, including Ciarán Hinds (above), Indira Varma, and Tobias Menzies. The reason for it’s cancellation after two seasons? Everyone at the time cited the high budget costs.
As Tech Insider notes, it’s rare for shows to sustain a budget of that magnitude, and those that do are usually in their later seasons, and much of it goes to paying the stars to not leave for other projects (Friends‘ final season is cited as an example—$6 million of its $10 million budget went to pay the stars.)
But when one stacks up Season 6’s total cost of $100 million per season against the the real competition in the fantasy genre—movies—it’s small potatoes. $100 million is what it cost to make Terminator 2…back in 1990. $100 million is what it cost to make Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets…back in 2001. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones’ contemporaries in the theaters, like Avengers: Age of Ultron, costs $250 million. The Hobbit movies cost $250 million apiece. If Game of Thrones ever moves to the movie theaters, as some suggest it will, would the budget balloon to those levels?
Taken by itself, $10 million an episode might seem like a huge amount, but when you look at it from this perspective, HBO is getting a bargain.
Via http://winteriscoming.net/2016/03/31/game-of-thrones-per-episode-costs-for-season-6-rivals-rome/
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