Yeah, reportedly each episode of Game of Thrones costs something like $6 million, Agents of Shield $3.8 million and Arrow $3.5 million.
Babylon 5
- Thread starter Kail
- Start date
That was twenty-plus years ago. And even then, that was for stuff done on the cheap (Babylon 5), with the Star Treks and Stargates of the world budgeted higher.
There's been talk on and off about them doing a new movie based on the original series, and they recently started talking about it being back on.
From Lurker's Guide: "Babylon 5 is produced on a per-episode budget of roughly $800,000, quite low for a science-fiction series; "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," by comparison, has a budget of roughly $1.6 million per episode, and Fox's "Space: Above and Beyond" is rumored to cost $2 million."
Holy shit! 800,000 bucks? Not even a million? They achieved hell of a lot with what they did have though. Remarkable!
Holy shit! 800,000 bucks? Not even a million? They achieved hell of a lot with what they did have though. Remarkable!
Some 20 years ago -- there's this pesky thing called inflation. Also production costs have increased as viewers expect higher production values. They couldn't be as penny pinching now.
In the Newsarama article JMS says he wants to move on to novels and plays. I wonder if there's any chance of him being able to convince WB to let him do novels? It wouldn't take a lot of effort on their part, and I doubt it would take anywhere near the number of readers for a novel to be successful as it would for a movie to be successful.
JMS was asked about this not long ago. In order to write in the B5 universe he'd have to license it from WB. Which starts at about $100K plus a cut of the proceeds. JMS' post is in response to a fan on FB:
https://www.facebook.com/officialjmspage/posts/10206632293983047
Jan
It's a shame that WB is just ignoring the franchise like that, it was a great series and has a lot of potential to be great again if it was brought back.
Would JMS have to buy the rights himself? Couldn't he try to approach a publisher and see if they'd be interested in getting the rights and working with him on the books?
Would JMS have to buy the rights himself? Couldn't he try to approach a publisher and see if they'd be interested in getting the rights and working with him on the books?
It would almost have to work that way. But the reality is that the B5 books, never really sold all that well (proving that complete lack of marketing works). So what publisher is going to put up $100K for rights to publish novels for a show that hasn't even been seen in reruns in the US for over 10 years? It's vanishingly unlikely, unfortunately.
That's one reason why two of the trilogies are hard to get all of the books. There was virtually no marketing, too, which didn't help at all. And by many standards it might not have been poorly but the publishing industry especially back then was moving away from mid-list titles and in search of bestsellers across the board.
So poorly in fact, trying to track any down these days in the UK is akin to an Indiana Jones adventure
I love this show to death, flaws and pockmarks an' all. But I've left it behind and, as attached as I may have been to it, I'm more interested in JMS' future work, especially with Sense8 and developing some of his older comic properties for film and TV - specifically Midnight Nation
As rewarding as writing comics for JMS probably was, barring his original own-brand material, I was never interested in them too much, so to see him focus on Film/TV and even books is more exciting to me.
Hugo - Well, maybe that's when things pay off. Maybe you have to be at the end of hope to make one last grab at it
I love this show to death, flaws and pockmarks an' all. But I've left it behind and, as attached as I may have been to it, I'm more interested in JMS' future work, especially with Sense8 and developing some of his older comic properties for film and TV - specifically Midnight Nation
As rewarding as writing comics for JMS probably was, barring his original own-brand material, I was never interested in them too much, so to see him focus on Film/TV and even books is more exciting to me.
Hugo - Well, maybe that's when things pay off. Maybe you have to be at the end of hope to make one last grab at it
As much as I like B5 If WB is going to be such dicks about the property maybe it's time for a new group of space heroes? A new start with a new future world JMS can own for himself?
After all we have lost so many of the old cast it would have to be rebooted anyway, let's make a clean sweep and not change the original.
After all we have lost so many of the old cast it would have to be rebooted anyway, let's make a clean sweep and not change the original.
Haha they had to collect all the First Ones....... They're like Pokemon you know. Gotta have them all.
First Ones Go.
Zog???????????????
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