The story of Vince Gilligan‘s iconic crime series, Breaking Bad, finally continued this weekend with the release of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. Aaron Paul once again takes on the role of Jesse Pinkman and the film picks up moments after the high octane Breaking Bad series finale. Jesse’s story was left open-ended in the original series and El Camino shows what happens to the character after the death of Walter White. Apparently the love for the acclaimed series hasn’t faded in the six years since it came to a close, as El Camino was a major success for Netflix over its first three days.
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Nielsen’s SVOD Content Ratings have reported (per THR) that El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie averaged more than 6.5 million viewers in its opening weekend on Netflix. Roughly 40% of the audience that tuned in watched on the very first day, about 2.65 million people.
The release of El Camino also helped boost the viewership of Breaking Bad on Netflix in the week leading up to its debut. The average audience of Breaking Bad last week was about 153,000 viewers, more than double its standard weekly average.
In addition to bringing back Jesse for one final story, El Camino managed to work in several of the popular character from the original series, including Bryan Cranston’s Walt. However, there were a few characters that didn’t make it into the follow-up film. Series creator and El Camino director Vince Gilligan had a reason for those that were left out.
“Primarily, I do want to see what happened to Skyler and Walt Jr. and Marie. I just couldn’t figure out how to work them in,” Gilligan said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “If they laid eyes on Jesse, they’d immediately call the cops on him. And I wouldn’t blame them. But you don’t want to see that. I couldn’t think of a reason they’d believably wind up interacting. It’s not like they’d be trying to help him out.”
Gilligan also wanted to work in Gus Fring, the main “villain” of the series for multiple seasons, but that wasn’t able to work out either.
“We have a quick time-lapse shot of the Pollos Hermanos, which is now a Twisters — it’s been rebranded, it says under new ownership on the sign. We’ve got shout-outs to things like that,” Gilligan said. “Also, I remember thinking during the plotting process, ‘It’d be cool too if we could see Giancarlo Esposito. Could we see Gus in a flashback?’ But I couldn’t figure that out either. You just go where the story takes you.”
What did you think of El Camino? Were there other Breaking Bad cameos you were expecting? Let us know in the comments!
