Disney+ Spent An Eye-Popping $211.6 Million on Marvel’s Floundering ‘Secret Invasion’ Miniseries: Report 

The secret’s out. The budget to Marvel’s Secret Invasion miniseries has been revealed, and it’s a whopping $211.6 million (£166.2 million), per the U.K’s Daily Express newspaper. This reported budget makes the show the second most expensive TV show on a per episode basis ever made, ranking above Netflix’s Stranger Things, which had a $270 million budget for nine episodes in its fourth season, and under The Lord of the Rings, which spent $465 million on its first season of eight episodes.

Based on the 2008 comic books of the same name, the series follows Samuel L. Jackson‘s Nick Fury, former director of S.H.I.E.L.D. and founder of the Avengers, as he teams up with Ben Mendelsohn‘s Talos, a shape-shifting Skrull, to find the renegade Skrulls who plan to take over the planet.

Jackson and the rest of the cast and crew filmed the show at Pinewood Studios located just outside of London, as well as on location throughout the UK.

The series, which will ultimately air six episodes, has released four of them, with the following two set to launch on Disney+ on July 19 and July 26, respectively. Within five days of being released, the show garnered 994,000 viewers. This may have initially seemed like a win for the series, which hit the #2 streaming spot in the week of its release per Yahoo! Entertainment. However, this also made it the second-lowest audience to view a Marvel Comics streaming series, besting Ms. Marvel at 775,000 viewers, per Samba TV.

Forbes reported that while shows released on streaming services often do not disclose the budget for their productions, as the costs get factored into the overall expenses and the budget is not accounted for individually. However, the outlet noted that since the series was filmed in the UK, the government’s Television Tax Relief program “allows studios to claim a cash reimbursement of up to 25% of the money they spend in the country.”

This perk for production companies requires that the project fulfill certain criteria, demonstrating how much time was spent filming in the UK, the level of UK content and how much they promote UK heritage which according to Forbes, explains why Brixton was chosen as the location of the Skrulls’ base.

Decider has reached out to Disney for confirmation, but did not hear back by the time of publication.

Amid some recent box office flops, Disney has been struggling, relying on content like Secret Invasion to dig them out of the holes created by Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Pixar’s Elemental.

Secret Invasion is available to stream on Disney+.