These days, blockbuster budgets are the new normal for prestige TV series. "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" has become the most expensive show ever In 2022 at an incredible price of $ 58 million per episode, competing age for streaming provided a ton of similar expensive series. Disney+ spent several years throwing real money full of money on his originals with streaming, with Andor costing $ 650 million in two seasons of 12 episodes, and Vandavision allegedly stunning around $ 25 million per episode.

It wasn't that long ago when Game of Thrones season 8 of $ 15 million in episode seemed to be a record sum. You didn't expect anything less than the biggest TV show of all time, right? But just a few years since that running in 2019, streaming used budgets and above what it seemed to bring Westeros to life. Even Westeros himself suffered the consequences, with the Game of Thrones House a series of dragon series "working at a $ 20 million episode for its first season.

Simply put, yesterday's price is not today's price when it comes to "top budget" television. However, if you scan through the current list of the most expensive TV season ever made, you will find an anomaly. The first 30 or so much in that competition all came out in the last six years, except for a lonely stance of 2010: World War II minisers and the monitoring of the "Brothers Band", "Pacific", produced (like its predecessor) by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. So what did this show so much more expensive than anything else that came before?

At the time of its release in 2010, the Pacific reported a budget of production of just over $ 200 million as a limited period of 10 episodes. At that time, the $ 20 million episode budget was unprecedented, and no other show would hit that mark again for more than a decade. However, at that time, the project did not look so absurd. First, it was a miniseries in the HBO - TV brand designed at the time to compete more with movies than with traditional television. The network has spent the last 10 years setting the production bar and the quality of TV so high that competitors have just begun to level.

Second, "The Pacific" was the successor to "Brothers Band", " A play that became a cultural phenomenon in itself when it premiered in 2001. The Sopranos was still in the early years at the time. No one has yet seen the "wire". In other words, the "Brothers Band" was one of the largest pillars that built HBO as the Film TV home. The collaboration between Spielberg and Hanks at the time naturally sparked one of the director's biggest hits ever to "save private Ryan" and that heritage could still be felt in the "Pacific".

That kind of pedigree put the show more in the company of Hollywood blockbusters than even other HBO shows. At that time, $ 200 million for a big movie picture was certainly not the norm, but it wasn't even unprecedented, with a series of as a series The films "Pirates of the Caribbean" breaking that number at the same time.

Even if there were many reasons to justify the huge budget for the "Pacific", it was still a risk. "The decision to continue with this, knowing the price, was frightening," FBO's programming president, Michael Lombaro, said. Hollywood reporter Back in 2010. "But everyone is proud of the result."

Logistics, production justified its costs. The reporting of the Pacific Theater at World War II demanded large combat sequences, with significant money spent on pyrotechnics and empty ammunition. And it is without mentioning the naval sequences. "We have been firing pyrotechnics every day for almost a year, which is unprecedented," Pyrotechnics expert Ossos Williams told Trurr. "And the fact that we used actors, instead of trick people, meant that I had to do the effects (ultra safe)."

It is difficult to accurately measure the financial success of the Pacific. At that time, the network was still fully focused on maintaining its brand reputation to drive subscriptions, so as we could look at 3.1 million viewers who joined the first episode of the show, the Pacific value at the time had more to do with how it continued to prepare HBO's premium status. That said, the show was a critical success and she won in an outstanding minisery that year.