Two extremely clever directors have somehow edited 'Breaking Bad' into a movie

Re-watching Breaking Bad (or watching it for the first time, if for some unforgivable reason you haven’t yet done so, you massive weirdo) is never going to be a waste of your time, but 62-odd hours is a dauntingly big commitment. 

Sometimes we find ourselves sat in an armchair – wearing our Los Pollos Hermanos T-shirts and listening to Badfinger’s ‘Baby Blue’ for the fourth time that day – thinking, “man, wouldn’t it be great if some really cool, ideally French directors decided to condense the entirety of Breaking Bad’s five seasons into a feature-length movie you could bash through in a single evening?”

Lo and behold, that is exactly what has happened. Directed by Lucas Stoll and Gaylor Morestin, Breaking Bad – The Movie somehow takes Vince Gilligan’s masterpiece and squeezes it all into just over two hours. 

This a lot more than just your average fan project. The two Breaking Bad devotees had two years of ‘sleepless nights and endless editing’ to make sure their movie retained the important parts of the narrative, while ‘re-imagining the underlying concept itself’. It had to feel like a feature-length film, rather than just a massive highlights reel, which meant that some characters became less significant than they were in the show. The two filmmakers told French website Clique that Walter White’s journey from chemistry teacher to murderous drug lord is the central focus, so Jesse becomes more of a background character.

Before you get any ideas, the pair have ruled out giving spin-off series Better Call Saul the same treatment. That’s a ludicrously ambitious project for someone else to pick up.