Westeros
The 'A Song of Ice and Fire' Domain
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Via The Hollywood Reporter, a wide-ranging interview with HBO’s Head of Drama, Francesca Orsi, touched on the budget of the upcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. To quote her in the piece:
As much as there was a day of budgets being a bit more robust and now, while they continue to be for a number of shows, there are some shows that we’re being charged with making for far less. I have an example that really took me aback. We’re doing a Game of Throne spinoff titled A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for under $10 million in episode, [which is peanuts] relative to what Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon cost episodically. And the battle sequences that the directors achieved match those across Game of Thrones and are a fraction of the price, so it’s a lesson for us that we need to be challenging these budgets.
Obviously, the story it adapts takes place basically in one location, and features a tourney rather than actual battles, so that’s part of it. But it also sounds like part of the appeal of adapting “The Hedge Knight” was its smaller scale that meant it could be done at a lower budget.
It’s interesting to consider how this compares to the first season of Game of Thrones. Airing in 2011, it was rumored to have a $5-$6 million per episode budget. Accounting for inflation, that would be the equivalent of $7 to $8.5 million USD per episode—possibly lower than A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms! However, we’re going to guess that production standards and techniques are still a bit higher and more advanced than was available almost a decade and a half ago, and not all aspects of production have inflated in price evenly, so it still seems to be about the ballpark of the show’s first season.