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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jdavis" data-source="post: 1303965" data-attributes="member: 8704">That's the development budget so I will assume it is for the development of original Sci Fi productions, such as series, mini series, specials and original run movies. That budget has basically doubled in the last five years. I think they realized the network would fail if it continued to rely on reruns (there are only so many science fiction shows out there and only so many times you can sit through the same episode of Knight Rider before you pull your hair out). The question to ask is what is the new show budget for other cable channels? I mean how does their new show budget compare with say Cartoon Network or Comedy Central? I don't have a clue and I had a real hard time finding any information on what Sci Fi's budget was due to the fact that I am not in the industry and recieve buisness journals and such. The big thing here is that it shows just how much money they have to work on for their yearly budget (this came into play big time when they tried to pick up Crusade but had already allocated their budget for the year). It might also explain the hesitation on Galactica, they have Stargate Atlantis and a new season of SG1 comming up (the SG1 season wasn't originally planned), can they get the money to do three space shows together? I mean it's one of the reasons why they claimed to kill of Farscape, they couldn't afford two space shows can they now afford three fo them? There was rumor of them wanting to do a Dune series too, can they do four space shows? That's a lot of programming to budget for them. Scare Tactics got renewed not based on ratings but based on the ever important ratings vs cost ratio, it was cheap enough to offset it's lackluster ratings to give it a second season to develop, most Space Operas just don't have that option.As for the show budget list those will vary due to script needs (as has already been mentioned). I remember reading a long time ago that set needs was one of the big reasons for the holodeck in Next Generation, if they were short on money they would just set a show on the holodeck and use whatever set was available out there or they would find a planet with a 60's style casino on it or such. They were vary consious of what sets on the lot weren't being used and I think they actually used some movie sets after that production ended so as to not have any of the budget go to set building and design. It's been a while since I read that but I think that was actually pretty common for space opera type shows. Lots of shows would use back lots sets to save money. A lot of shows now are done outside of Hollywood to save money so you don't see that as much anymore. Another thing for comparison the average episode of Friends runs around 4 to 6 million depending on what figures you see. The original budget for Enterprise was around 5 million a episode and it doesn't do anything near Friends numbers. It's not episode cost it's episode cost vs ratings.</blockquote>

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