Breaking Bad ended its award-winning five-season run in 2013, but the series finale wasn’t the end of the story. Not only does Walter White’s criminal lawyer Saul Goodman have his very own prequel series, Better Call Saul, but the film El Camino, a direct sequel to Breaking Bad, will air on Netflix this fall.
Written and directed by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, El Camino will premiere October 11 and reveal what happened to Walter White’s assistant and partner-in-cooking Jesse Pinkman — portrayed by Aaron Paul — directly after Breaking Bad‘s last episode. Here’s everything we know about El Camino so far.
(Warning: Major spoilers for Breaking Bad follow.)
The trailers and release date
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie will hit Netflix on October 11, 2019. The latest trailer for the film (see above) premiered September 24 and puts the focus on Jesse while also revealing some of the supporting characters — both new and familiar — who will appear in the film.
A few days before that trailer was released, a brief preview of the film debuted during the 2019 Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony and featured Jesse listening to a news report on the violent events of the show’s finale.
Confirmation of the film’s release date came in August, courtesy of El Camino‘s first trailer.
The El Camino teaser showed only one character from the beloved series, Skinny Pete, who is apparently being questioned on the whereabouts of Jesse Pinkman after his disappearance from captivity.
“No way I’m helping you people put Jesse Pinkman back inside a cage,” Pete says, his face heavily damaged by years of meth use.
If you don’t have Netflix, you should be able to watch El Camino eventually. According to The New York Times, the movie is expected to air on AMC sometime after its Netflix debut.
Playing catchup
If you need a refresher before El Camino arrives, Breaking Bad‘s entire 62-episode run is available to stream on Netflix at your leisure. If you don’t have time to revisit the entire series, Netflix has released a brief recap of Jesse’s journey in a three-minute video set to Chloe X Halle’s haunting song Enchanted.
Just a few weeks earlier, Paul shared a scene on Twitter from the seventh episode of Breaking Bad‘s third season, “One Minute,” along with this message: “Here’s a moment from Breaking Bad to slowly prepare you all for what’s to come.” In the clip, which was written by Thomas Schnauz and directed by Michelle MacLaren, Jesse blames Walter White for everything that’s gone wrong in his life and does his best to end his association with his former chemistry teacher.
Cats out of the bag…and the bag is in the river. Here’s a moment from Breaking Bad to slowly prepare you all for what’s to come. #BreakingBad #Netflix #Elcomino ⚗️???????????? https://t.co/q3VdCCLxZe
— Aaron Paul (@aaronpaul_8) August 25, 2019
It’s not clear if Paul shared this scene because it’s important to El Camino or if Paul simply wants to get everyone hyped for the movie by sharing one of Jesse’s most emotional moments. Either way, it’s a great reminder of just how great Breaking Bad could be. El Camino can’t come soon enough.
The cast and crew
El Camino will be as authentic a Breaking Bad experience as you can get. As mentioned, the Netflix film was written and directed by Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad and wrote and directed both its pilot and its finale, as well as a number of other episodes.
So far, the only cast member announced for El Camino is Paul, who played Pinkman on the series. Given that Charles Baker’s Skinny Pete appears in the trailer, however, it would be strange if he didn’t make an appearance in the final film.
Otherwise, almost every major Breaking Bad character has been rumored to return for El Camino at some point, although it’s not clear how accurate any of these reports are. Revenge of the Fans, for example, claims that both Breaking Bad lead Bryan Cranston and Jessica Jones‘ Krysten Ritter, who played Jesse’s girlfriend, Jane, in the show’s second season, will make appearances in El Camino. Given how both of those characters’ stories ended on Breaking Bad, it’s hard to imagine how they’ll fit into the El Camino timeline, although the show did make liberal use of flashbacks, dream sequences, and hallucinations. El Camino could go the same route.
The plot
Netflix’s official summary for El Camino says that the film will center on Pinkman’s journey to come to terms with his past in order “to forge some kind of future” after escaping from neo-Nazis in the Breaking Bad finale.
As dedicated Breaking Bad fans remember, Jesse spent the last few episodes chained up and forced to cook meth. He was freed by his one-time partner, Walter White, and he drove off in an old Chevrolet El Camino, which is where the upcoming film gets its name.
Filming
Last fall, The Albuquerque Journal reported that a Breaking Bad movie was in preproduction under the code name “Greenbrier,” and that it was expected to begin filming in November 2018. As it turns out, that wasn’t entirely true. According to Paul, by the time the press learned about El Camino, filming was already complete.
“I just said I was doing this small little indie out in New Mexico and that was it,” Paul told The New York Times. “No one second-guessed it.”
This summer, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk confirmed that El Camino had been filmed entirely in secret. “I find it hard to believe you don’t know it was shot. They did it … How is that a secret?” Odenkirk said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “But it is. They’ve done an amazing job of keeping it a secret.”
Updated on September 24, 2019: Added a new trailer for the film.
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