Arcane, Riot's two-season League of Legends animated series, reportedly cost $250 million to make
A new Variety report says Arcane, Riot's League of Legends-based animated series, cost a whopping $250 million for just two seasons, an astounding pile of money that makes it «far and away» the most expensive animated series ever produced for television or streaming platforms.
Riot did not confirm the reported figure, but chief product officer Marc Merrill told Variety, «We’re more than comfortable with the spend it took to deliver a show that was worthy of our players’ time.»
Arcane will comprise 18 episodes in total when its two-season run ends, meaning the overall spend works out to just shy of $14 million per episode. To put that into perspective, that's not much less than the per-episode cost of the final season of Game of Thrones; to use a show I find more relatable, you could make roughly seven episodes of Stargate SG-1 for what Riot spent to do one ep of Arcane. Only approximately 33 Hollywood films have cost more to produce, though Arcane is of course much longer—and considerably more acclaimed than many of the blockbusters on that list.
As for how Riot ended up spending so much money on what is, when you get down to it, a cartoon, Variety said the main issue was «inexperience» in the field, which led to profligate spending and frequent cost overruns. Riot also spent $60 million promoting the first season of Arcane, according to the report, which was far more than Netflix—where the series actually ran—spent on it.
The report goes deep into Riot's seemingly stalled aspirations to grow into an entertainment company beyond the boundaries of videogames. In 2020, for instance, Riot hired Avengers masterminds Anthony and Joe Russo to head up a film set in the League of Legends universe, but when it had second thoughts on the project it was forced to pay them $5 million to walk away from it. Former Netflix exec Shauna Spenley, who was hired in 2020 to head up Riot's new entertainment division, left the company in August, and the report says the division has been
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