If you haven’t watched Breaking Bad yet then it’s probably best to steer clear of the upcoming El Camino as, according to an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, writer-director Vince Gilligan let loose that the film will not do any backtracking in order to bring non-Breaking Bad viewers up to speed.
“If, after 12 years, you haven’t watched Breaking Bad, you’re probably not going to start now,” Gilligan said. “If you do, I hope that this movie would still be engaging on some level, but there’s no doubt in my mind that you won’t get as much enjoyment out of it. We don’t slow down to explain things to a non-Breaking Bad audience. I thought early on in the writing of the script, ‘Maybe there’s a way to have my cake and eat it too. Maybe there’s a way to explain things to the audience.’ If there was a way to do that, it eluded me.”
Gilligan also explained how the film’s concept came about.
“But I started thinking to myself, ‘What happened to Jesse?’ You see him driving away. And to my mind, he went off to a happy ending. But as the years progressed, I thought, ‘What did that ending — let’s just call it an ending, neither happy, nor sad — what did it look like?'”
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Written and directed by series creator Vince Gilligan El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is described as follows: “In the wake of his dramatic escape from captivity, Jesse must come to terms with his past in order to forge some kind of future.” Emmy winner Aaron Paul will reprise his role as Jesse Pinkman for the film, calling it “a chapter of Breaking Bad” that he didn’t realize he wanted.
The Emmy Award-winning series aired on AMC before seasons were later made available on Netflix. Vince Gilligan credited the streamer for its contribution to the show’s success in his 2013 Emmy acceptance speech, saying that he thinks Netflix helped keep the show on the air.
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AMC’s Breaking Bad ended its critically acclaimed five-season run with a finale that brought in a series record 10.3 million viewers. It was followed by the prequel series Better Call Saul, focused on Bob Odenkirk’s small-time lawyer Jimmy McGill, which just got renewed for a fifth season.
The film will be available for streaming on October 11, exclusively on Netflix.
