'Andor' Season 2 Almost Went Bye-Bye Thanks to Streaming Apocalypse

Like a lot of entertainment writers who wildly speculate on these things like giant dorks, I just assumed that Andor Season 2 was a locked-in package deal, which explained how it still went into production despite Season 1 having the lowest views of any of the Disney+ Star Wars series. Not so much!

Turns out the critical acclaim helped save Andor, which came very, very close to beating The Acolyte as the first Star Wars series to get the axe. Season 2 was not a done deal, and that’s something I should’ve realized because, originally, the show was going to run for five seasons. However, while filming the first season, Tony Gilroy realized that would’ve been insanity and immediately started scaling back. Yet despite that constriction, Andor was still at the whim of its numbers and the streaming market, which was going through some things.

In a new interview with THR, Gilroy fielded a question about how right before the Andor Season 1 premiere in 2022, studios realized they were dumping an insane amount of money into streaming content with very little return if any at all. That was not a good time to be helming a wildly expensive Star Wars show that would take several minutes before finding an audience. The situation was so bad, that Andor almost went off into the sunset after Season 1.

Everything had changed. [Disney CEO Bob] Iger was back. People were getting laid off. The sky was falling. Our attitude between [EP] Sanne [Wohlenberg], Diego [Luna], and I was like, “Well, we hear you, but we only have what we have. We’d be happy having season one just be the show. We’d rather not do it than do it lame.” And we really meant it. We weren’t playing chicken or anything. We were just telling the truth. But everybody was in a terrible position. And man, the critics helped us. The weirdness of our numbers started to help us. I don’t know what our numbers really are, but I’ve been told they’re eccentric and they go in the opposite direction of what people expected. They rise over time, and they must have had some comfort for Disney that I’m unaware of for them to gamble. Kathy [Kennedy] gambled and Iger gambled, but it would have been either/or. I don’t think there’s a skinny version of it that worked.

Of course, walking away would not have been the worst thing given how freaking hard Gilroy and his team nailed the Andor Season 1 finale. Now, he’s faced with the unenviable task of following up a masterpiece, and it seems Disney+ still did a little meddling: Namely, the Season 2 release schedule that will drop three episodes every week. Gilroy has repeatedly confessed that he wrote the show as three-act mini-movies, but despite popular belief, he didn’t intend for them to be released that way. He’s since made it clear that was Disney’s call, and he doesn’t seem thrilled with the move. However, he concedes that gunning the show out faster could hopefully grease the wheels for his next movie with Oscar Isaac and raise the profile of Andor’s cast.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s a complicated question,” Gilroy told THR. “We didn’t write this with the newspaper. We didn’t plan on timing with anything like that. The show is meant to be timeless and classical. I wish we’d come out in August or September, but everybody has been sitting on their hands for so long. There are so many actors in the show, and some of our amazing actors don’t have agents. So some people aren’t working, and they’ve been waiting for stuff to come out.”

Andor Season 2 drops its three season premiere April 22 on Disney+.