DreamWorks Animation CEO Offered to Pay $75 Million for 180 Minutes More of 'Breaking Bad'

When you're worth infinity dollars, you can do crazy things that normal people can't afford. Buy the Batmobile. Purchase a trip to the International Space Station. Offer $75 million for 180 minutes more of Breaking Bad.

That last one was courtesy of DreakWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg. According to Variety, the media mogul was willing to pay to have Breaking Bad keep things going past its finale.

“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.

My first thought at hearing this news was that Katzenberg was being kind of douchey, tossing his money around in a way that was pretty elitist. The rest of his plan for Breaking Bad made me think he may have been onto something though. According to Variety, Katzenberg wanted to break this chunk of Breaking Bad up into 30 six-minute segments and charge viewers between 50 and 99 cents to watch online.

“I said (to them), ‘I’m going to create the greatest pay-per-view television event for scripted programming anybody’s ever done,’ ” he explained.

That's actually pretty new-media genius. Now, I don't think it would've worked with Breaking Bad, but that's only because it would have been to extend the show beyond its natural ending. Say talks between the Breaking Bad camp and AMC had fallen apart (as they almost did) and Vince Gilligan and company went looking for a new home for the show's final season — that would've been the time for Katzenberg to strike with a deal like this.