So here’s something that happened: Six weeks ago, before he knew how the series ended, Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg offered to pay $75 million in exchange for three additional episodes of Breaking Bad that he planned to split up into tiny pieces and sell online.
“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.
“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 explained that he had intended to show the extra content as six-minute segments over 30 days online. [Variety]
Let me be clear right off the bat by saying that this is an awful idea. Just awful. He wanted to commission three superfluous episodes of a show that had been driving toward a defined endpoint for years, split them up into six-minute segments, and then charge viewers $0.99 per episode for the privilege of watching one of those segments a day for an entire month. Can you even imagine? SIX-MINUTE SEGMENTS. There would have been riots.
But let me also say that I love this story so much that I want to wrap it in a blanket and cuddle with it for hours on end, because this is some Grade-A Eccentric Billionaire Sh*t right here, and I can never get enough of that. Never. I mean, he offered the producers of the show $75 million for three episodes of television, on the condition that he could have his way with them. That’s basically the plot of Indecent Proposal, but with Katzenberg as Robert Redford, Vince Gilligan as Woody Harrelson, and critically acclaimed television series Breaking Bad as Demi Moore.
This GIF feels appropriate, no?
