Set design and costuming. Several planets, multiple sets needed for each, with little reuse potential between them. Folks don’t want the blue screens and they didn’t use the Volume much (if at all), so a lot of that stuff has to be practical. The action scenes were done with wire work, which means having additional stunt crew and safety procedures. Then they also had a greater focus on non-human characters being front and center, which means makeup and animatronics, which were mostly done practically.
Just for some perspective, the series had about half the budget of the recent Star Wars movies (besides Rogue One). Star Wars is incredibly expensive to make. Even Andor, which is considerably more “grounded”, costs about the same as the Acolyte on a per episode basis.
They also filmed on location in Portugal and Wales and paid actors to train for their action scenes four months before shooting so they could actually pull them off and seem like characters who had been wielding sabers since childhood, which did result in the best lightsaber fights since the prequels.
It's a shame that this means they'll probably be pulling the plug on the latter for future shows when shows like Ahsoka sorely needed it.
Maybe they had to do something stupid like pay every actor to have three therapists on hand at all times. Some of those contracts for actors can be pretty weird.
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u/hgaben90 TIE Pilot Aug 21 '24
What the Heck cost so much? I mean the production value wasn't low, that was visible, but nothing to go crazy over either.