If Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg had had his way, Breaking Bad wouldn’t quite be finished yet and everyone involved in the show would have come away with a few extra quid while they were at it.
Breaking Bad fans who watched the finale just over a week ago are still coming to terms with the fact that it’s actually over, but under different circumstances, we might have had three more hour-long adventures with Walt, Jesse and company and been able to prolong the enjoyment of one of the best TV shows of modern times.
In a conference for TV and entertainment content market MIPCOM in Cannes yesterday, Katzenberg revealed that he had offered the show’s creators $25million per episode to make three episodes after the finale and he had a rather novel idea about how he was going to make the money back.
As he explains in the video above, Katzenberg wanted the episodes delivered in six-minute segments that would then be made available to consumers for a small fee on a daily basis, with the entire three episodes costing approximately $15 after consumers had paid 50 cents per day for 30 days.
It all sounds way too complicated for us, but Katzenberg, it seems, was deadly serious, telling The Guardian: “My idea was literally that you’d pay 50 cents a day for 30 days, so it would be $15, and I actually think there are 10m people around the world that would have done that.
“That’s $150m, so the $75m I was prepared to pay would have delivered a 100% return on investment. And I’m trying to get people to think about this space in a new way by telling that story. It’s emblematic of an opportunity coming.”
“They’ll pay for it if it’s good, and if they feel there’s great value,” Katzenberg added.
“You’d pay 50 cents for six minutes of Breaking Bad! And why? Because it’s the best show on television.”
Having obviously put a lot of thought and effort into allowing the show to draw to a conclusion when it did, Vince Gilligan and company turned Katzenberg’s proposal down, but it does go to show that the Dreamworks chief sees a future in charging consumers for bite-sized content, which we’re not too sure we’d be so keen on.
Saying that though, three extra episodes of Breaking Bad would have been pretty sweet, yo.
Video via YouTube/mipmarkets
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