A new report has come out revealing that each episode of Season 4 of Stranger Things is claimed to have a budget of around $30 million. The report comes from the Wall Street Journal, who has been looking into Netflix's new approach to driving growth, which has seen the company shifting away from just throwing money around on massive budget productions.
It's said that to offset the production costs of a lot of the streamer's biggest shows like Stranger Things, it is now favouring leaning into "under-the-radar" hits, such as Virgin River and Squid Game, with the former reportedly costing around $3 million to make per episode.
To this end, the disparity between its bigger hits is also mentioned in the report, as it's said that "big-ticket programming such as the special-effects-filled show Stranger Things" has a "per-episode cost of $30 million".
While $30 million is nothing to sneer at, and definitely dwarfs a lot of the biggest TV series in the past (Game of Thrones final season was said to have a per-episode budget of around $15 million), Amazon's upcoming Lord of the Rings series, which is said to be one of the most expensive series of all-time, is reported to cost the company around $465 million to make just the one season.