What would you give for another few episodes of Breaking Bad? Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg was willing to give quite a lot apparently, to the tune of a whopping $75 million: You think we're joking, but we're not.
As per Variety, Katzenbrg told TV execs at the Mipcom mart in Cannes that he'd offered to commission three new episodes six weeks ago, and was willing to cough up $25 million for each of 'em. "I had this crazy idea," Katzenberg explained. "I was nuts for the show. I had no idea where this season was going. I said [to them], ‘I’m going to create the greatest pay-per-view television event for scripted programming anybody’s ever done.’”
Now you might notice the term pay-per-view popping up there, and there's a very good explanation for it. The Dreamworks boss said his intention was to show the extra content online in six-minute segments over a period of 30 days, charing viewers from about 50 to 99 cents per episode.
Of course, that was before he knew where Vince and co were going with the series, so the whole thing was rather hypothetical. Plus, it seems as though his ambition was to make more cash from the show, rather than to extend the tale for the fans... "The last series cost about $3.5 million an episode," he said. "So they would make more profit from these three shows than they made from five years of the entire series."
Guess money just wasn't the driving force for Cranston, Vince Gilligan and co.
