Arcane, Riot’s two-season League of Legends animation series, cost $250 million, according to reports.

Variety reports that Arcane, Riot’s League of Legends animated series, cost $250 million for only two seasons. This is an incredible amount of money, making it "far and above" the most expensive animation series ever produced for TV or streaming platforms.

Riot did confirm the reported amount, but chief product office Marc Merrill told Variety that "we're more than happy with the expenditure it took to deliver an event that was worthy of the time of our players."

Arcane's two-season run will end with 18 episodes, which means the total spend is just shy of 14 million dollars per episode. Riot spent the same amount to produce one episode of Arcane as Game of Thrones' final season. To use a more relatable show, you could have made seven episodes of Stargate SG-1 with the money Riot spent. Only 33 Hollywood films cost more to make, although Arcane is much longer and more acclaimed.

Variety explained that the main reason Riot spent so much on what was, at the end of the day, a cartoon is because they were "inexperienced" in the industry, which led them to spend extravagantly and have frequent cost overruns. Riot spent $60 million on promoting Arcane's first season, according to a report. This was more than Netflix, where the series ran, spent.

The report delves into Riot's apparent stalled ambitions to become an entertainment company that goes beyond videogames. Riot, for example, hired Avengers masterminds Anthony Russo and Joe Russo in 2020 to direct a film set within the League of Legends Universe. However, when the company had second thoughts, it was forced pay them $5,000,000 to walk away. Shauna Speenley, a former Netflix executive who was hired to lead Riot's entertainment division in 2020, left the company last August. The report states that the division is "essentially disbanded."

Merrill told Variety that despite the apparent shift in priorities "[Riot]'s] ambitions for entertainment haven't shifted," he said. "We never intended to operate as a traditional studio, with traditional timelines. As we learned more, changed our expectations: We realized getting it right took a lot longer than we had originally anticipated, so we re-calibrated our development goals, teams, and output goals with that in mind.

Riot's two rounds of layoffs earlier this year, in which 530 people were laid off in January and 27 more in October, may reflect that change in thinking. In an email sent out to employees, Riot CEO Dylan Jadeja admitted that the company had made "a number big bets" as it expanded to become "a multigame, multiexperience company" in 2019. However, he also acknowledged that "some of our significant investments aren't working out the way we expected." Riot Forge was also closed as part of the January layoffs. Riot Forge was a publishing initiative that the company launched in 2019 for single-player League of Legends titles like The Mageseeker or Ruined King.