Producers of Breaking Bad could have easily squeezed out more episodes and even a season if they dragged the show out, but they were respectable and ended the show when it should have. However if DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg had his druthers there would have been three more episodes. Katzenberg told television executives in Cannes that he offered to pay #25 million per episode for three more 60 minute shows. The episodes would continue from where the show sadly ended.
Katzenberg had a crazy and ambitious pay-per-view idea:
I said (to them), ‘I’m going to create the greatest pay-per-view television event for scripted programming anybody’s ever done.’ 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.
The DreamWorks CEO explained that he had intended to show the extra content as six-minute segments over 30 days online and charge viewers from around 50 cents to 99 cents per episode. Later, he learned how show creator Vince Gilligan wanted to end the show and realized his idea wasn’t possible. A zany idea, but with 10 million viewers for the finale I think they could have done quite well with a three-episode mini season. Would you have paid money to watch three more episodes?
[Variety]
