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Arcane, the Netflix animated League of Legends spin-off series, is the most expensive animated show ever made, according to a new report by Variety.
The show's 18 episodes reportedly cost a total of $250 million to make and promote. League of Legends developer Riot Games, who also produced Arcane, declined to confirm this figure, but told Variety, "We’re more than comfortable with the spend it took to deliver a show that was worthy of our players' time." Production on season 1 is said to have cost around $80 million, with season 2 setting the studio back nearly $100 million. Riot also reportedly spent $60 million of its own money on promotion for season 1, on top of what was spent by Netflix.
Arcane is the only show or movie to come out of Riot Games, despite plans announced to expand into scripted entertainment around five years ago. The upcoming second season of Arcane is set to be the last, even though five seasons were originally planned.
"Our ambitions in entertainment haven’t changed," Riot co-founder Marc Merrill told Variety. "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."
The show follows Jinx (Fallout's Ella Purnell) and Vi (Hawkeye's Hailee Steinfeld), two sisters who find themselves on opposite sides of an escalating conflict between the utopian city of Piltover and Zaun, its oppressed underbelly.
