El Camino premiered October 11 on Netflix, and the Breaking Bad movie pulled in some massive numbers in its first few days on the streamer.
To say El Camino was a highly anticipated movie is a pretty huge understatement. For Breaking Bad fans, the fate of Walter White’s accomplice, Jesse Pinkman, has been hotly debated for years. Vince Gilligan choosing to make a Breaking Bad sequel movie, offering a canonical answer to what happened to Jesse after he drove away from the Neo-Nazi compound he was imprisoned at, was a pretty huge deal for fans of the show.
Variety reports that 2.6 million viewers in the US streamed the movie within the first 24 hours.
In total, the film’s first three days on Netflix pulled in 6.5 million viewers; 36% of those viewers were in the 18-34 age demographic.
If you’re not sure if those are impressive numbers or not, for comparison, Variety reported that the Breaking Bad final season premiere raked in about 5.9 million viewers on Netflix in 2013. So that’s a definite uptick in viewership.
Overall, reviews for El Camino have been largely positive. On Rotten Tomatoes, critics gave the flick a 93% Certified Fresh rating, and 83% of fans liked it as well.
While there was certainly some fan service in the film, giving us a lot of information on where several characters ended up after those final Breaking Bad credits rolled, the movie did stick pretty closely to just telling Jesse’s story. It didn’t necessarily add or detract from Breaking Bad, but it was a fun and poignant journey back into the Breaking Bad universe.
The Breaking Bad world is one that is really tough to leave as the stories Vince Gilligan and the rest of the show’s team told us there were incredibly moving and engaging.
It will be interesting to see how El Camino continues to perform after its first weekend. It’s unclear if fans will find the movie rewatchable, or if it will be a “one and done” kind of experience. Either way, it seems to have made a big impression on the fandom, which is just how Jesse would have wanted it.