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This week finally marks the premiere of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. Secretly shot over 50 days, El Camino chronicles what happened to Aaron Paul’s Jesse after the events of the show’s iconic final episode. But there’s one mystery looming over this upcoming film that has little to do with blue meth, vengeful cartels, or what the DEA knows. Why exactly is the Breaking Bad movie coming to Netflix first?
The answer to that question has to do with the show’s complicated history bridging the gap between traditional cable and streaming. Though Breaking Bad is one of shows that turned AMC into a prestige hub, Vince Gilligan’s series has always had a special relationship with Netflix. In some ways the streaming giant helped save one of television’s greatest shows.
In 2010 Breaking Bad was in a difficult place. It was a critical darling, but AMC had a difficult time justifying its cost. The network told Gilligan and Sony that the series may have to end after Season 3. AMC quickly retracted that threat after seeing how interested FX and its other competitors were in continuing Walter White’s moral decline, but that fear of ending prematurely led to AMC and Sony looking into more creative viewership options. That’s how Breaking Bad came to the still upstart streaming service, Netflix.
Originally the crime drama was supposed to land on Netflix following its fourth season. That deal was pushed up so that Seasons 1 through 3 were added to the streaming service in the hopes subscribers would get hooked binge-watching on Netflix before turning to AMC for new episodes. It was a strategy that worked shockingly well. According to Variety, Breaking Bad‘s Season 5’s premiere episode saw 5.9 million total viewers for AMC, a statistic that was more than double Season 4’s premiere. The show’s finale went on to break a staggering 10.3 million viewers. Well before Lifetime’s You swelled from under-appreciated to becoming one of the most popular shows of 2018, Breaking Bad benefited from the Netflix boom.
So when Gilligan started shopping his script for El Camino, AMC and Netflix immediately came to mind. “We were a natural home for the movie,” Cindy Holland, Netflix VP of Original Content, told The Hollywood Reporter for a recent profile on Gillian. “It wasn’t a really long conversation. It was a simple, ‘Yes, please.'” Since the announcement of El Camino Holland revealed that viewership of Breaking Bad has gone up on Netflix.
Partnering with Netflix also fulfilled one of Gilligan’s dreams for his iconic series. Every time AMC would launch a new season of Breaking Bad, the network would screen the premiere episode in a theater. “We would have this wonderful, very limited, one-time opportunity to watch our television show on a big screen with giant stereo speakers thumping, the image filling 40 feet across,” Gilligan explained in The Hollywood Reporter’s profile. “I always thought, ‘This thing, it looks like a movie. It doesn’t look like a show.’ I really want to be able to share that with fans.”
Thanks to this unconventional partnership everyone is getting what they want. Gilligan is getting a chance to return to Albuquerque with the theatrical release he’s always wanted. AMC is getting another chapter in its hit series, which is reported to premiere on the network sometime in “early 2020.” Netflix is getting its own piece of the hit series that helped transform the streaming service into such a television powerhouse. And fans everywhere are getting one last story about Jesse Pinkman they can watch either in their homes or in select theaters. El Camino will screen for one weekend only in 61 cities across the country. For once in the Breaking Bad universe, every is getting their due instead of getting cut.
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie premieres on Netflix Friday, October 11. The film will also be available in select theaters from Friday, October 11 to Sunday, October 13 and will premiere on AMC in 2020.
