Arcane Is The Most Expensive Animated Television Series Ever Made

Riot Games’ Arcane is a show-stopper of a series that has been turning heads since the first season dropped in 2021. Fans are now getting deep into the highly anticipated second season of the show, but recently a stat surfaced showing just how much of a financial burden producing the series was on Riot Games.

It was confirmed in an interview with Variety that Arcane cost a whopping $250 million to produce in full. That makes it the most expensive animated series to land on linear or streaming television services ever.

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Money Well Spent

Arcane boasts a phenomenal cast, stellar acting, and mind-blowing visuals, which is par for the course when it comes to Riot Games’ animated sequences. The company has long focused on piecing together some of the best visual content in the business, such as the punchy animated promos they assemble for the League of Legends World Championship year after year.

In an interview with Variety, co-founder of Riot, Marc Merrill, suggested that despite the bloated cost, the company isn’t wavering on the animation front:

Our ambitions in entertainment haven’t changed.

We were never intending to operate like a traditional studio with traditional timelines. What did change as we learned more was our expectations of ourselves: We realized that getting it right takes a lot more time than we’d originally expected, and so we recalibrated our development, output goals and teams with that in mind.

In addition, Merrill addressed the cost of producing Arcane:

We’re more than comfortable with the spend it took to deliver a show that was worthy of our players’ time.

League of Legends is one of the most popular games ever made, and it boasts a phenomenal esports ecosystem that pulls in millions of viewers with ease. The recent League of Legends World Championship broke viewership records as the event’s grand final series was streamed live from London.

Do you think the $250 million investment to produce 18 episodes of a show for a streaming service is appropriate? Let us know on the Insider Gaming forum.

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