That Ultra-Secret New ‘Breaking Bad’ Movie Might Drop On Netflix
It’s been six years since Breaking Bad aired its bloody, tragic finale, but you wouldn’t know it.
People still shout “I am the one who knocks”, people still drive by one of the houses featured in the show to throw pizzas at it (despite series creator Vince Gilligan asking them nicely not to, and despite the current owners erecting a goddamn iron fence), and people still walk around wearing ‘Heisenberg’ and ‘I Am The Danger’ t-shirts, eyes flashing in excitement, hoping to meet another Breaking Baddie out in the wild.
Well, it turns out that Gilligan can’t let go of the show either. He’s spent the last few years overseeing spin-off show Better Call Saul (which, heretical opinion forthcoming, is almost definitely better than Breaking Bad), and he’s currently deep in production on a Breaking Bad spin-off movie.
oh good, another decade of talking about BREAKING BAD!
— anchor baby saraiya (@soniasaraiya) February 13, 2019
Well, uh, about that, actually. As Deadline reports, it’s not clear that the still-untitled flick (it might be called Greenbriar, although that’s more likely to be a fake working title) is even going to be a movie; Gilligan apparently hasn’t dismissed the idea of cutting it up into a TV series.
Deadline has another bombshell to drop too: apparently, there’s a strong chance that ‘Greenbriar‘ might debut on Netflix.
Breaking Bad has a long history with the streaming platform — Gilligan has claimed that without Netflix’s help in boosting viewing numbers, the show might have been cancelled way back at the end of season two.
Netflix is basically the reason BREAKING BAD was able to survive to its conclusion – Gilligan's said BB would've been cancelled after Season 2 had it not boosted the show's viewership – so the sequel premiering there is a no brainer. Stop writing that it's 'weird'.
— Jacob Knight (@JacobQKnight) February 13, 2019
That’d be great for us Aussies. After all, whatever you might want to say about Netflix, it’s a blessing that all of its originals drop at the same time internationally, meaning we don’t have to wait for our thoroughly broken cinematic distribution system to eventually dump a hyped-flick on our screens.
Other details on ‘Greenbriar‘ are scant. But given back in November, Bryan Cranston announced that he hadn’t seen the film’s script, it’s safe to say that it’ll be a sequel to the main series — that would explain why Cranston hasn’t been let in on the ground floor, his character being (spoilers for Breaking Bad, a show you definitely should have watched by now) y’know, dead.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time a Breaking Bad movie has been a glimmering prospect on our horizons. While the series was still on air, Steven Soderbergh, he of Erin Brockovich and Sex, Lies, And Videotape fame, reckoned that the finale should be one long movie.
There are reports that he offered his directorial services to Gilligan, suggesting he could make it himself, which, given the experiments he’s been doing with iPhones and weird distribution models recently would have been… interesting!