Earlier this week, we reported on the news that the Disney+ series from Marvel Studios would have “budgets comparable to a Marvel film budget, which typically run between $100 to $150 million.” Of course, that sounds pretty good in a headline, and it’s pretty cool in theory, considering how relatively low budgets in TV usually are…but is it ACTUALLY comparable to the budget of a Marvel Studios picture?

Well, let’s look at the figures. According to The Numbers, Ant-Man, Ant-man and the Wasp, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor, Thor: The Dark World, and The Incredible Hulk are the only MCU movies to have budgets under $150 million. The rest range from $160 million to $250 million to $400 million. So, based on that alone, it would seem this theory could mostly be put to rest.

But, I mean, that’s me being anal…so why not dig a little deeper and go beyond the surface there and see if the spirit is actually true. Let’s look at Ant-Man, which had a reported budget of $130 million. That falls squarely within range of the supposed budgets of the Disney+ shows.  

RELATED – Disney+ Marvel Series Have Feature Film Budgets

Ant-Man is 118 minutes in length, and if you split the budget up by minute, it means that roughly $1.1 million was being spent per minute of film being put out.

So how would this compare to the shows? Sadly, we don’t know the runtime nor official season length, but we’ve heard six episodes and it seems like a safe assumption that they’d range from 45 mins to an hour an episode. Let’s say 50 minutes to be safe. If we assume there are six 50-minute episodes, that’s 300 minutes. Divide that by the 130 million budget, we are left with roughly $433,000 per minute of television. 

This works out to over $21.6 million per episode. This is incredibly expensive for a television show (Game of Thrones episode budgets famously hit around $15 million near the end), but I can’t say that it really compares to what’s being done on the big screen.

Now, that’s not to say these movies won’t look good — I’m sure they will — but to compare them to even one of the thriftiest MCU film, it’s clear there is a real difference in budget, and it’s probably a good idea to go into these shows with our eyes wide open on the matter.

Will these shows have amazing budgets? It sounds like it. But will they actually be on par with budgets of the feature films? If you’re looking at it on a minute-by-minute basis, nah, not really. But does this matter to you? Let us know your thoughts down below!

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SOURCE: The Numbers