Jeffrey Katzenberg Offered $75 Million For Three More 'Breaking Bad' Episodes
Think you're a big fan of Breaking Bad? Jeffrey Katzenberg has you beat. The current CEO of DreamWorks Animation, who also helped Disney return to animated glory in the Nineties, reportedly offered $75 million to the show's creators for three more episodes of the hit TV show. He wanted to release additional episodes, in segments, online over the course of a month and make people pay for each one. This was, however, before he knew the ending of the series.
Variety reported on Katzenberg's crazy offer, which he revealed at the Mipcom conference in Cannes a few weeks back:
I had this crazy idea. I was nuts for the show. I had no idea where this season was going. The last series cost about $3.5 million an episode. So they would make more profit from these three shows than they made from five years of the entire series. I said (to them), 'I'm going to create the greatest pay-per-view television event for scripted programming anybody's ever done.
Katzenberg's idea was to release six of the 180 new minutes online each day for thirty days, charging up to a dollar per segment.
Later, he learned how show creator Vince Gilligan wanted to end the show and realized it wasn't going to be possible.
While Katzenberg's idea is obviously totally nuts, it begs the question, could it have worked? 10 million people watched the finale of Breaking Bad. If even half of them bought thirty 6-minute segments at $1 apiece, that's $150 million, double the money invested. That doesn't count the amount of money the cast and crew would have had to be paid of course. And advertising, hosting and more. But it still seems like, the hype machine was building to such a fever pitch that any and everyone would have bought the episodes after that TV finale.
What do you think?