Stranger Things season four is reported to cost 30 million dollars an episode.

Comparing that

• Breaking Bad season five was 3.5 million an episode.
• Game of Thrones season eight was 15 million an episode.
• Loki season one was 25 million an episode.

Stranger Things at 30 million dollars an episode is one of the most expensive shows ever and the most expensive Netflix series, episode by episode.

To also break this down per minute, the longest Stranger Things episode was the final episode of season 3, which was 77 minutes long.

It’s reported that Stranger Things season four will be nine episodes and the episodes will be longer than normal.

If we run with the average that the new season will be 77 minutes per episode, that means Stranger Things season four is $389,000 a minute.

Just to show the gap, the finale of Breaking Bad cost 3.5 million to make and with 55 minutes as the run time, $63,000 a minute.

Obviously this shows an industry change, where the per minute cost of making a show are becoming comparable to the cost of making a movie.

The bigger question though is what exactly made this season so expensive, compared to the others?

• Season one was 6 million an episode.
• Season two was 8 million.
• Season three was reported at 10 million.

First reason was the COVID factor.

An example of how expensive COVID made some movies was the movie Top Gun 2, which is coming out next year, after a long delay from COVID and has a reported budget of 152 million.

That sounds normal for a big blockbuster, but it was originally reported it’d cost 125 million.

Due to issues with COVID during production, where reshoots, delays, shorter film days and more were a factor, the film went heavily over budget, similar to other movies.

Stranger Things season four was paused by COVID during the middle of production and had to do a heavy amount of reshoots, due to the issue of having a younger cast and it not making sense if they were randomly a year older.

This was an expense, where apparently half of what was done before had to be redone.

Second factor, salaries.

Millie Bobby Brown, who is now the highest paid teen actress in the world, where it was reported she was paid 6 million for Enola Holmes 2 on Netflix is reported at making $350,000 per episode, which is the same as Winona Ryder and David Harbour.

The salaries for the other teen/younger actors is also high, going from $100-250,000 an episode each.

This is a big jump from season one, where the salaries were reported at being under $25,000 an episode for everyone in the cast.

The salary cost alone for the cast is now about 2-2.5 million an episode, which is about a third of what the first seasons episodes cost.

Third factor, Coca Cola.

I really loved season three, but one thing that sort of annoyed me was the constant product placement for Coca Cola and other brands in the show.

This was annoying, but ultimately financed a lot of the series, where it’s undisclosed how much they paid, yet a simple comparison could be James Bond.

Heineken spent 45 million dollars for product placed in the Bond movie Skyfall, where Daniel Craig came out saying he didn’t believe the movie would have been made without that deal.

Skyfall made 1.1 billion dollars in theaters, which would mean over 50 million people saw it globally.

Stranger Things season 3 was seen by 64 million households in just the first month after release.

Also, Stranger Things season 3 was done with 8 episodes that all featured Coca Cola, showing way more screen time over Heineken in Skyfall.

This makes the case that Coca Cola along with many other brands are paying comparable dollars to what Heineken paid, if not more.

This is probably the biggest reason why season four costs so much. They’ve hit a point of so much success, Netflix doesn’t need to fund it as much and they can rely on larger brands to pay for everything.

Final thoughts

We’re entering a world where previously TV was seen as a joke with lower budgets and cheap effects, while movies were everything.

Now it feels we’re heading to the opposite, where movies are getting lower budget and more independent, while series are attracting bigger actors, bigger special effects budgets and more attention.

Cool change and look forward to season four.