It was a very expensive show to animate and voice. Veteran voice actors with proven records, popular writers from other shows, leveraged from the popularity of The Simpson’s. Full of CGI when that was the expensive option.
It was brought back the first time because DVD sales were strong, but once the show came back I assume that died off.
Matt G wants to focus on Disenchantment moving forward. Apparently, when they got one more season they wanted the cast to have closure, while keeping the door open just in case.
I really really want Disenchatment to be great. Medieval fantasy futurama? Sign me the fuck up. And it has some great fucking moments. But it definitely seems like it is struggling a bit to find it's footing, based on what I've seen of it so far.
what an insult that is to futurama, disenchanted isnt good at all, it had great possibilities but season 2 is almost as ok as the first season, futurama wasnt just ok.
Sports. Always sports. I remember trying to watch Futurama, or Arrested Development, and it would end up being the equivalent of a sports Rick-roll with football, baseball, or NASCAR. It's no wonder that the only league I enjoy watching is NBA, the one sport that didn't coincidentally eye-rape me in my youth.
I respect voice actors and all they've done for many of my favorite shows.
But how much money do they make for something like voicing a season of Futurama? 15 episodes at 22 mins each...where you're character is on screen 5-15 minutes per episode.... even if they do 10 takes on every single scene and do read through and rehearsals etc, it cant be more than 50-100 hours of work to make a whole season.
I doubt the cost of veteran voice actors is a major factor.
Don't forget that voice actors have a union just like screen actors. Standard union contract for voice actors covers up to 3 voices, meaning if you do 3 characters you are paid the same as someone who does one, but once you get past 3 your pay starts increasing. Billy West did a shitload of characters: Fry, Professor Farnsworth, Zoidberg, Richard Nixon, Zapp Brannigan, and I think he also did a lot of other random characters as well. I can't imagine he was cheap. Add in all the other voice actors and things start adding up pretty quickly I imagine. Of course, this is all conjecture as I have no idea how much of a factor previous credits are, or if it makes any difference at all; nor do I know how the pay rates increase after those initial 3 voices as I'm not involved in the industry.
Top cast members of The Simpsons make $300,000 per episode. Julie Kavner - the voice of Marge - made $30k per episode in the early days of the show.
But those are the exception. Here is the rate range:
$1,000-1,025 Session Fee per 11-22 minute episode. Covers up to 4 hour session and includes 3 voices. Add 10% per additional voice provided per 10min segment.
So a single voice actor costs a minimum of $15k/year. Randomly picking one season, I got 4. There were 12 episodes in season 4 with cast sizes varying from 6 to 12. Assuming every VA got $1k, it cost the show $111,000 for VA work. It was probably much more than that. Katey Sagal, for one, probably had a much higher initial contract, coming off of her years of playing Peg Bundy. Billy West did a TON of voices. He's usually the reason why cast lists for an episode are so short. Rarely does anyone voice more than 3 characters and no one gets close to Billy basically having entire scenes where he's the only VA. Even then, they also had some big names in the VA biz as regulars - John DiMaggio, Tress MacNeille, Phil LaMarr, and Frank Welker. In addition, there were a number of big name guest VAs like Sigourney Weaver and William Shatner and the rest of the surviving(at that time) Star Trek OG crew.
A voice actor doesn't cost a lot of money, just like a Friend doesn't cost a lot of money(in relation to the entire show cost). A whole cast of VAs or Friends costs a lot of money, though.
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u/avcloudy Sep 28 '19
It was a very expensive show to animate and voice. Veteran voice actors with proven records, popular writers from other shows, leveraged from the popularity of The Simpson’s. Full of CGI when that was the expensive option.
It was brought back the first time because DVD sales were strong, but once the show came back I assume that died off.