Ultraman Nexus was a show that got cursed with an unfortunate streak of bad luck that caused the show to fail in a multitude of ways. This, of course, didn’t help the weakening financial state of Tsuburaya Productions. However, as I stated before in previous articles, the fall of Tsuburaya Productions was eventually going to happen, the chaos at the executive level was unavoidable.
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When the show entered production, the executive chaos finally reached the creatives working on Nexus. The old spending habits of the Kazuo Tsuburaya era where a show had no real set budget per episode and an entire show could cost at least 52 million USD to over 100 million USD (the reports are very scattered and the claims on how much he was spending were extremely all over the place, one iconic example was when he spent 32 million USD on a single episode), wasn’t allowed anymore. Nexus got hit hard by a limit of around 0.9 million USD per episode, which if it was a full series would be around 46 million USD or less. No exceptions in spending would be allowed....
The budget cuts greatly affected how they would approach making Nexus a reality. In an instant, most of the options for practical effects greatly shrunk. The number of kaiju suits they could make got drastically reduced, there was a limit to how many sets and sound stages they could have, and they couldn’t film on location often due to not being able to rent places for long. As a workaround for this, they developed concepts like the metafield which would allow them to use one set repeatedly and reusing kaijus by making them stronger, run away more often, or have regenerative properties. Another workaround was the usage of CGI. They had always been planning to use CGI in Nexus to do more grand sequences and effects not possible by normal means, but under the strict budget, CGI had to replace multiple practical aspects of the show.
