DreamWorks CEO Offered $75M for More Breaking Bad

If you would have paid a few extra bucks for a couple more hits of Breaking Bad, you weren't the only one. DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg was so "nuts for the show" that weeks ago he offered to pay $75 million for three more episodes, Variety reports; that's $25 million per episode or $415,000 per minute. Clearly it never came to be, but "the last series cost about $3.5 million an episode," Katzenberg told an audience of TV execs in Cannes. "So they would make more profit from these three shows than they made from five years of the entire series."

"I said, 'I’m going to create the greatest pay-per-view television event for scripted programming anybody’s ever done,'" Katzenberg explained; his "crazy idea" was to dole out the extra content online in six-minute chunks over 30 days, for 50 to 99 cents per episode. And though that dream ultimately died, the idea is still there. "I just think that there is a whole new platform for (short form) entertainment," he said. "The higher the quality of the stuff that fills it, the higher people will be paid for the work that they are doing there." Maybe he'll spend the big bucks on this Breaking Bad spinoff instead. (More Breaking Bad stories.)