While primarily a prequel to Breaking Bad, a significant portion of Better Call Saul unfolds after the events of the original series. In those monochrome sequences, we find Jimmy (alias Saul and Gene) employed at a Cinnabon in a mall in Nebraska. As Peter Gould, who contributed to Breaking Bad and served as a showrunner on Better Call Saul, points out, Gene was originally set to be at a different popular mall establishment.
Gould shared a snapshot from the script of the second-to-last episode of Breaking Bad on Bluesky, where Saul entertains the thought of working at Hot Topic instead of Cinnabon. “I mean, a month from now, best case scenario, I’m managing a Hot Topic in Omaha,” Saul states in the script.
In the caption, Gould remarked, “Found this page from an earlier draft of #BreakingBad’s penultimate episode. Cinnabon? Not just yet!”
The next day, he provided further insight on the change from Hot Topic to Cinnabon. “We discovered that Hot Topic was selling #BreakingBad merchandise, and we didn’t want it to appear like a cheap promotion. So we went with Cinnabon! (They had no idea about it until the episode aired.)”
Of course, at the time that Gould and the Breaking Bad writers crafted that dialogue, they had no inkling that Better Call Saul would eventually bring this storyline to life. Cinnabon became such a crucial element of Better Call Saul that Bob Odenkirk, who played the lead role, even learned how to prepare the famous cinnamon rolls himself. “I know the ingredients for Cinnabons. And I’m not going to reveal them. So you can still enjoy them,” Odenkirk told Conan O’Brien in 2016.
