Crazy Rich Asians Series Ordered to Outspend Its Own Fictional Billionaires Every Episode
Producers say the show must literally out-rich its characters, a mandate that is going about as well as budgeting advice usually does.
The forthcoming continuation of Crazy Rich Asians will reunite Constance Wu and Henry Golding, with Michelle Yeoh and Ronny Chieng joining the cast, according to the studio behind the project. Internal guidelines obtained by no one in particular reportedly require that each episode's production budget visibly exceed the net worth displayed by its own characters, to preserve what one memo calls "narrative integrity of opulence."
By the second episode, this meant replacing a single CGI yacht with three real yachts tied together, none of which the production could afford to untie. By the fourth, a wedding scene originally scripted as "lavish" was re-shot as "structurally excessive," requiring the set to be rebuilt as an actual, permitted venue with its own zoning variance.
"We came together to ensure the show never looks poorer than its premise," said a production spokesperson, pausing mid-sentence to excuse themselves to a meeting about whether the craft services table could legally be considered a load-bearing structure. "It's less a TV show now than a very expensive dare."
The finale, originally planned as a reconciliation dinner, has reportedly been rewritten three times to keep pace with its own art department, each draft containing a larger table, a longer table setting, and fewer remaining members of the budgeting team. Studio executives maintain the show will still wrap on schedule, assuming the schedule is also allowed to grow more expensive than itself.
Asked whether the mandate might be scaled back before the studio runs out of money entirely, the spokesperson said only that doing so would be "tonally inconsistent with the source material," before leaving to authorize a second helicopter for a scene that does not currently involve a helicopter.