The upcoming Halo TV show is almost here, and it releases March 24 behind a lot of anticipation and a considerable monetary investment from Paramount Plus, it seems. Variety reports that Season 1 had a budget of $10 million per episode, which puts Season 1’s overall spend at around $90 million for nine episodes.
Variety did not cite anyone or anything for the $10 million budget figure, but Paramount Plus chief programming officer Tanya Giles said the show represents a “swing for a broad audience.”
“My hope is this expands what the Paramount Plus brand can mean,” Giles said.
If $10 million is indeed the per-episode budget for the Halo series, it would be similar to HBO’s Game of Thrones, which is said to have cost $10 million per episode for earlier seasons before rising to $15 million per episode for the final two seasons. Disney+’s Marvel TV shows are estimated to cost as much as $25 million per episode and are believed to be the most expensive TV productions in the business.
Not only was the Halo TV series very expensive to produce, it went through a series of rewrites and revisions, thanks in part to the writers having extra time due to COVID-related shutdowns. Showrunner Steven Kane said he wrote more than 265 drafts of the nine Season 1 episodes.
Fans will get to see how that money and time was spent when the series premieres March 24. Also in the report, Kane–who will not return for Season 2–said he and his team did not look at the Halo video games when planning out the show.
“We didn’t look at the game,” Kane said. “We didn’t talk about the game. We talked about the characters and the world. So I never felt limited by it being a game.”
343’s Kiki Wolfkill said a key decision in the show’s development was when the team decided to have its own canon called the Silver timeline, which is separate from the games. As announced previously, the TV series will reveal Master Chief’s face, whereas the games have never done this.
“Early on, we were thinking about doing something that could tie very closely with the game,” Wolfkill said. “What we were finding was, trying to verbatim stay with everything that’d come before wasn’t serving the medium. It also wasn’t serving the creative teams and their need to express a story and build the world through their eyes.”
For more, check out what reviewers think of Halo Season 1.
Source: Gamespot
