Celebrity News

CEO wanted to drop $75M on 3 more ‘Breaking Bad’ episodes

Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg offered to pay $75 million for three extra ‘Breaking Bad’ episodes, he has revealed.

Variety reported that Katzenberg told an audience of TV execs at the Mipcom conference in Cannes that six weeks ago he offered to commission three extra episodes, totaling 180 minutes – of the show, offering to pay $25 million per episode.

His plan was that the episodes would continue from where the show ended.

“I had this crazy idea. I was nuts for the show. I had no idea where this season was going,” he said during the keynote session at Mipcom, according to the Variety report

“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,” he said.

He said he had intended to show the extra content as six-minute segments over 30 days online.

“I said (to them), ‘I’m going to create the greatest pay-per-view television event for scripted programming anybody’s ever done,’” charging viewers from around 50 cents to 99 cents per episode.

But this was before Katzenberg knew what would happen in the “Breaking Bad” season finale, which put the whole idea on ice. The final episode went out on top last month with 10.3 million viewers.

“I share the story with you only to tell you that I have the courage of my convictions in this. I just think that there is a whole new platform for (short form) entertainment … and the higher the quality of the stuff that fills it, the higher people will be paid for the work that they are doing there,” he said.

DreamWorks Animation bought YouTube entertainment network AwesomenessTV for $33 million at the end of April.