Fans are looking forward to Andor Season 2, which has also been announced as the last, essentially tearing apart the original plan for the show that was in place when it was first announced.
Before Andor Season 1 premiered on Disney+, it was revealed that the show would only last two seasons. However, thanks to interviews and reports, the original plan was that it would run much longer than that.
It is worth noting that Andor's length changed multiple times, and although Season 1 was one of the best-received projects in Disney+ history, there is a good reason why it was shortened.
Why Andor Shrunk From Five Seasons to Two
In April 2022, months before Andor Season 1 was released, news broke that Andor was originally supposed to be five seasons.
That information came from an interview with Adriano Goldman, the show's director of photography. Notably, Goldman stated at the time that the plan changed from five seasons to three.
After that, in September 2022, Denise Gough (who plays Dedra Meero in the series), confirmed the original five-season plan. However, she also corroborated reports that Andor was only going to last for two seasons, meaning that it shrunk even more since Goldman revealed that three seasons were in the works at one point.
It is worth noting that Gough also stated in her interview that one of the main reasons for Andor being condensed was due to Cassian Andor actor Diego Luna. She claimed that he said he would "die if [he did] five seasons:"
"We sort of signed up for five years. We thought they were gonna be five seasons of this and then thankfully Diego [Luna] was like, ‘I’ll die if I do five seasons.’ So they condensed it into this amazing– I don’t know how he’s done it, but he has condensed… Tony Gilroy has managed to do one more season and you’re gonna have told the whole story."
However, something else likely had more of an impact on the show's longevity - its massive budget.
Reports surfaced after Andor Season 1's release that the first installment cracked the $250 million mark in terms of budget, making it the most expensive season of a Star Wars Disney+ show ever.
To make matters worse, other reports from sources like Forbes revealed that Andor Season 2's production was even more expensive, coming in at $291 million.
After combining the budgets from both seasons and adding on some extra costs, reports indicated that the two seasons of Andor cost around $645 million, which is a shockingly high number.
Director Tony Gilroy talked about the five-season plan in an interview with Empire Magazine but didn't mention anything about how expensive the show was.
Instead, he claimed that he and Diego Luna agreed that they were in over their heads with five seasons and didn't think they could make that big of a commitment to the show:
"Oh my God, we are going to have to come up with another 12 hours of story? So I was already panicked. We already said we were going to do five years [of timeline], that was the concept. How do you get out of that?"
Gilroy explained that they then came up with the idea to make Season 2 (which has already broken a Disney+ record) have four blocks of three episodes each with each block covering one year leading up to the events of Rogue One.
If Andor Is So Good, Why Worry About the Budget?
It is no secret that both critics and fans thought Andor was one of the best Star Wars projects in recent memory. As of writing, the show has a 96% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and an 87% audience score, meaning that it performed extremely well with all audiences.
However, just because everyone thought it was good does not mean it was a success in corporate eyes.
Unfortunately for Andor, its demand was well below other Star Wars projects such as The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
For example, one report detailed that when Andor premiered, its demand was more than ten times lower than any other Star Wars Disney+ project on their respective start dates.
If Andor is not bringing in gargantuan viewership numbers to match its budget, Disney cannot justify continuing it. $645 million is a lot of money for any corporation, and if Disney did not feel as though it was getting a good return on investment from Andor, the only logical move was likely to end it.
However, instead of just canceling it outright, it at least gave Gilroy and the rest of the cast and crew the chance to tell the complete story in a bit of a nontraditional way.
In the end, Gilroy and Luna were probably also telling the truth about how they didn't want to commit to the show for five full seasons and be under the stress of telling that big of a story. So, it likely worked out best for all parties that Andor was condensed down to two seasons.
Andor Season 1 is streaming on Disney+, and Season 2 is expected to premiere sometime in 2025.
