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I'm entertaining a dream in which I win €140,000,000 in the EuroMillions draw and use it to fund the return of unfairly-cancelled shows.

Using any available figures, how much would a third season of SGU cost to produce, to roughly the same stellar level of production quality as was enjoyed by the first two seasons?

Bear in mind that some overheads for set construction and the like, not usually borne out per episode, or even per season, would now have to be covered for the first time since the first season premiere.

Edit: Bonus points for costing the full and complete resurrection of the wonderful late Joel Goldsmith.

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Hey! That's my dream! I'm considering funding Firefly season 2 :-) – Steve Melnikoff Feb 15 at 11:10
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How about to start a campaing on kickstarter.com? If an episode cost about 3 million, if 300.000 people donate 10 dollars per episode (i will be the first in line), that way we can have SG-U back again! :) Anyone interested on contacting the producers and start the campaing? – Sebastian Feb 15 at 22:59
@Sabastian: OK yes but we'd need the whole season for the reasons that sarge_smith lays out. Say at a minimum ten episodes (absolute minimum) we need 3 million people. That's hard to do with a kickstarter campaign. – Lightness Races in Orbit Feb 16 at 2:57
@LightnessRacesinOrbit i removed some of the comments that were about whether this was on-topic for scifi or not, to prevent users from getting confused. – DForck42♦ Feb 18 at 19:43
@DForck42: Looks like some that were not about that have come back. Thanks for that :) – Lightness Races in Orbit Feb 19 at 5:48

migrated from scifi.stackexchange.com Feb 14 at 23:30

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I can't seem to find a actual sourced number but most of the places I checked had a budget of between 1.5 and 3 million per episode. There was no budget jump between seasons 1 and 2 so you would need between 30 and 60 million to produce the normal 20 episode season.

Your sets are normally amortized out over the course of the season as a part of the pre-filming production work. In other words, it is included in that 1.5 to 3 mil episode number.

A final note: You would be unable to film single episodes for that value. The numbers presented here are the the "economy of scale" numbers that you would get by funding an entire season. If you tried to make a bunch of individual episodes, you would be paying some costs multiple times, resulting in a 25 to 50% increase in price (Depending on shooting schedule, your talent costs and pre and post productions cost). You would also have to pay for a license that would have to be negotiated and I have no way of determining how much that would cost you, beyond expensive.

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Excellent; that's about what I expected. We're good to go, then! All I need now is that jackpot. Shall we wait on the porch? – Lightness Races in Orbit Feb 14 at 21:37

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