Arcane's showrunners claim that the'most costly' animated series produced was not as expensive as you might think.

Arcane's 2nd season is now out. After watching the first three episodes, it looks like it's shaping up well. Both in terms of its graphics and, well, a disproportionately hyped storytelling for something that was spawned by League of Legends. The game has a lot of interesting and detailed lore. But 'a landmark in animation' was not the bar I expected the series to reach back in 2021. And it still surprises me now.

It's still the last season of the game, despite its popularity. Some say it's because it cost over $250 million to produce and market. It's a huge number, but the showrunners Christian Linke & Alex Yee revealed to Gamesradar last week that it's less than it appears at first glance.

Linke says that the marketing costs are not included in the budget for Arcane. Linke says that it was still expensive, but not because it wasn't. "Arcane was a really costly animated series, which is what the point of Arcane was." Our dream was to make an animated series with the same fidelity as animated movies.

Yee's comment, which I am finding more and more reasonable the second after he says it, is: "If you compare animated movies to us, we are dirt-cheap."

While $250 million might not seem "dirt cheap" unless you're Scrooge McDuck, when it comes to making anything at this scale and runtime, it's just above average--record-setting for an animated series, sure, but not even a chart topper when it comes to TV. Let's say that Arcane's budget for marketing and distribution was 50% of the cost of production, which is what you would spend on movies.

Arcane's raw production value drops to $166 million. It will have 18 episodes total over its two seasons. That's $9.2 per 40+ minute episode. Arcane is certainly expensive, but here are some recent TV shows that were reported to be more expensive than Arcane.

• House of the Dragon costs around $20 million for each 50-70 minute episode.
• Stranger Things season 4 is around $30 million per episode.
• Rings of Power reportedly spent $60 million for each 60-75 minute episode.

Yee made a comparison between Arcane and animated films. Disney's Frozen 2 produced an hour and forty minutes of cinematic animation for $150 million. This is about 2.5 Arcane episode in terms of duration, which would cost Netflix $23 millions before marketing costs. Arcane is a much more beautiful piece of animation, I would say, than Disney's crowd-pleasers.

Even if you're not as charitable and reduce the $250 million budget to say 20%, which would be around $205 for total production costs, it's still only about $11 million per episode. Costly. About the same as The Boys' estimated budget for season 1.

Lee also claims that even though Arcane is expensive, it is worth it: "You have great voice actors. We really tried to find them." We wanted to give artists the time they needed to add their own touches, and have so many different disciplines be able show their abilities. The money is a reflection of how much effort was put into the project.

You know what? They're right. Arcane is one of my favorite pieces of animation. It looks expensive for the amount of money that went into it. The budget of Arcane is commendable, but only in comparison to other animated series and movies. Dirt cheap is actually a pretty accurate description.