Breaking Bad's Creator Said No to $75 Million for 3 More Episodes

Every action has consequences. That is a core idea Vince Gilligan embedded into the iconic TV series Breaking Bad.

And some of those actions can only lead to laughter, especially if you are a powerful mogul trying to convince a talented team.

In less than six months, it will be ten years since Breaking Bad's finale. Fans are still discussing the tragic ending with deep philosophical undertones that the show's creators wove into it. However, it could have been entirely different.

Vince Gilligan and his crew were offered vast sums of money to extend the popular show. Surprisingly, it wasn't a demand from the production company but a request from an influential individual who was incredibly passionate about the series.

The individual in question was Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the biggest media tycoons in the United States and co-founder of DreamWorks Animation. In 2020, journalist Kyle Buchanan tweeted a snippet of a conversation with Katzenberg.

According to Katzenberg, he approached the Breaking Bad team before the last season was released with an offer to pay an incredible $75 million to extend the series. 'At the time, they were producing these shows for $3.5 million an episode, so to literally buy three new episodes for that amount of money meant they would have made more profit from the purchase of those three episodes than they’d made from five years,' he said.

The creators, led by Gilligan, laughed off the offer. It's a strange reaction when you're offered extravagant riches that could pay off your entire career for the last few years, isn't it? That's what Katzenberg thought, except he didn't know what would happen to the characters at the end of the series.

'And I said, "Sorry, I missed the joke here. I don’t know why you’re all laughing." They said, "Sorry, we can’t tell you, but it will reveal itself to you why this isn’t going to work out for us,"' he continued.

When he finally saw the finale, the mogul understood the reason for their laughter, realising that they had planned from the beginning for each character's fate to come to a tragic end. Sure, for that kind of money, the ending could have been changed, but we have to admire Gilligan and the team for their dedication to giving the story a definitive ending.

Source: Twitter.