More Than 25 Million Netflix Accounts Streamed El Camino in its First Week

In case you forgot over the last few years, people really love Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan‘s groundbreaking crime series was a perennial awards contender each and every year and posted stellar ratings for its final season in 2013. The show has found an even larger audience on Netflix, which ultimately led to the streaming-exclusive debut of an epilogue film, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. Gilligan wrote and directed El Camino while Aaron Paul returned to star as Jesse Pinkman, showing what happened to the beloved character after the events of the show. If there was any doubt that people would still care about Breaking Bad all these years later, they were squashed by the debut of El Camino earlier this month.

It was reported that 6.5 million viewers watched El Camino in its first weekend on Netflix, but that number more than tripled over the course of its opening weekend. Netflix tweeted on Wednesday that more than 25 million people watched the film over the course of its first seven days.

“El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie was watched by 25,734,392 households in its first seven days,” reads the tweet from Netflix.

These numbers are certainly strong, even when compared to some of Netflix’s most popular original titles over the last year. Bird Box was the most-watched Netflix film over the last 12 months, with 80 million total viewers. The 10th most-watched was Fyre, which had 20 million views. So El Camino became one of Netflix’s 10 most-watched originals movies this year in just a week’s time.

Part of the intrigue surrounding El Camino was the mystery of which Breaking Bad characters would return. There were ultimately a few key characters that didn’t make it back, but Gilligan had a reason for leaving them 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: A Breaking Bad Movie? Let us know in the comments!