‘The Walking Dead’ Episodes Cost More Than $3 Million Each in Season 1, Leading to the Showrunner Getting Fired
The popular AMC series The Walking Dead is coming to an end. After 11 seasons, there’s a lot for fans to look back on. Most agree that the first season, even though it was only six episodes long, was exceptional. It turns out that there’s a good reason it was so well done. The budget for that first season was huge. In fact, the cost led to The Walking Dead showrunner Frank Darabont losing his job.
‘The Walking Dead’ premiered in 2010
The blockbuster series about zombies ends in 2022. The often gruesome show has hung on for 11 seasons. And it takes a lot of people to make up the zombie-infested world. The show employs about 200 extras every season to fill in all the needed characters.
To maintain the division between the living and dead characters, the actors don’t even eat together behind the scenes. Reportedly, the walkers even get less variety of food than the other characters. Perhaps that’s one way to make sure they seem hungry when the cameras are rolling.
The huge cast isn’t the only expense. The show also requires a lot of costumes, sets, and post-production work. Because of this, the cost of making it has always been high. But the first season also cost someone their job.
High costs led to someone getting fired
When the series debuted on AMC, it was written and produced by Oscar nominee Frank Darabont. The six-episode season was a huge success with viewers and critics alike.
Darabont not only poured creative energy into the show, but he also sank a great deal of the production budget into each episode. The cost to create the first season ran to a whopping $3.4 million per episode, reveals BuzzFeed. And AMC wasn’t happy about the price tag.
For season 2, AMC wanted to get 13 episodes, and they cut the budget to $2.75 million per episode. Ultimately, Darabont simply couldn’t agree to the cuts, and he was let go, writes Forbes. Producers claimed that it was because of his behavior, such as when he wrote an email stating, “Everybody especially our directors better wake the f— up and pay attention or I will start killing people and throwing bodies out the door.” However, Darabont and others insist that it was about the cost.
Did the viewership suffer?
In the years following the first season of The Walking Dead, the hit continued to grow in viewership. But that didn’t last. The Observer reports that the statistics for the last five years have shown a steady decline in viewers.
However, as the show entered its final season, interest in it has been reignited. This is probably due to a number of factors. Viewers who had lost interest want to see how the story will end. Since past seasons are now carried on Netflix, it’s easy for people to catch up on what they missed. Between that and AMC+, it’s easier than ever to binge all of The Walking Dead episodes you want.
There’s also the matter of all of the spinoffs. Fear the Walking Dead premiered in 2015, followed by the limited series The Walking Dead: The World Beyond. In August 2022, Tales of the Walking Dead, an anthology series, premiered. With all these connected stories, many fans returned to see how the original will end.
