Breaking Bad Team Originally TURNED DOWN $75 Million For 3 More Episodes
The producer cooked up a plan to purchase three further Breaking Bad episodes for $25 million each.
With Breaking Bad having come to a close back in 2013, it’s now been revealed that the show was very nearly concluded in a vastly different way to what audiences were treated to.
Releasing details from an old interview with DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan has explained how Katzenberg had a plan to get an additional three full episodes of Breaking Bad at a cost of $25 million per episode.
In this new information, Katzenberg had presented the Breaking Bad team with the offer of producing three further episodes for a total of $75 million. Given that it took $3.5 million to make each episode, that was an absolutely ridiculous amount.
Why was Katzenberg willing to pay so much for just three episodes, then? Well, he wanted to splice up each of these episodes into short-form bitesize chunks of television that he could release in five or ten-minute instalments; his plan being to release an installment a day at the cost of $1 each.
Kyle Buchanan took to Twitter to clarify the specifics.
The interesting thing about this is, since then, Katzenberg has been working on launching his Quibi streaming service for 2020. And what will be so unique about said streaming service? Why, it will consist of short-form TV, much in the same way that he had planned for Breaking Bad.
More recently, another on-demand service, Netflix, has picked up the first-air rights to the 2020 Breaking Bad movie that will focus on Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman.