El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie to Premiere on Television in February

Though it has already premiered in theaters and been streaming on Netflix for a few months, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie will finally get the opportunity to play where it belongs, on the AMC TV Network. TV Guide revealed the news this week, which also came with the announcement that a full marathon of the entire series of Breaking Bad will air ahead of the film’s premiere. This celebration of the Emmy award winning series arrives just before the new season premiere of prequel spin-off Better Call Saul.

To kick it all off, the first season of Breaking Bad will air in succession starting on Sunday, January 19 at 4 PM ET. Following that Breaking Bad season 2 will air in its entirety starting Sunday, January 26 at 8 AM ET with season 3 on Sunday, February 2 at 8 AM and season 4 on Sunday, February 9 at 8 AM. The extended season 5 of the series will kick off at 1:30 AM ET on Sunday, February 16 and play all day, closing out and leading up to the world television premiere of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie at 8 PM ET that same day. The week after this, the season five premiere of Better Call Saul will debut on Sunday, February 23 at 10 PM ET.

Breaking Bad series creator Vince Gilligan wrote and directed El Camino which saw Aaron Paul return to star as Jesse Pinkman, showing what happened to the beloved character after the events of the show. The film premiered on Netflix in October of 2019 and was seen by 6.5 million viewers in its first weekend, with that number tripling over the course of its first week on the streaming service. Netflix revealed that after just seven days, El Camino had been viewed by 25,734,392 households in its first seven days.

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.”

Will you watch El Camino when it premieres on AMC? Sound off in the comments below!