5 Reasons Citadel Turned Out to Be a $300 Million Disaster for Amazon

Amazon Prime's spy show, starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, has been stuck in development hell for a long time, with the people behind the show fighting each other for the chance to realize their creative vision.

And now that the first two episodes of Citadel have finally been released, fans are wondering why this average-looking series became one of the most expensive in television history, with approximately $300 million wasted on just six episodes of the show.

Here are five reasons why Citadel became so expensive.

Russo Brothers in the lead

When the directors of Avengers and Winter Soldier are serving as producers on your show, you'd better be prepared to spend an insane amount of money on the project, as the two are not willing to work on a shoestring budget. And while Russo's connection to the series was seen as a big win for Amazon Prime, it later proved to cost the streaming giant quite a bit of money.

Original showrunner was fired

The original plan was for Josh Appelbaum to write the script and become the showrunner for Citadel, and he got quite far and started shooting.

However, both the Russo brothers and Amazon were a bit concerned with the direction Applebaum was taking, and instead of working out the problems, he was simply fired during filming.

Citadel had two different cuts

Before Applebaum was fired, he tried to prove that his vision was superior to the Russos' by making his own cut of the series while the brothers did the same. In the end, Citadel existed in two cuts for quite some time, meaning that an ungodly amount of money was simply wasted on an internal creative dispute.

Citadel went through a ton of reshoots

When Russo fired Applebaum, they had to fix all of his mistakes, which resulted in Citadel going through a lot of reshoots that cost about $65 million, making an already insanely expensive show even more expensive.

Amazon paid an upfront fee

While the project faced a lot of problems behind the scenes, it's quite clear that Amazon was willing to pay a huge price for Citadel even at the very beginning of production. As the streaming service was intending to launch a new super franchise, a huge upfront fee was needed.

Citadel Season 1 Episode 3 will arrive on Amazon Prime on May 5, 2023.