‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ Featurette: How the Ambitious Netflix Experiment Was Made

black mirror bandersnatch featurette

Imagine: a universe where Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker said no when Netflix approached him with the idea of doing an interactive Black Mirror project. It’s a whole parallel universe that butterflies out into millions of other possibilities and choices until your brain hurts — essentially what Black Mirror: Bandersnatch achieves as Netflix’s first choose-your-own-adventure feature film. But that almost happened, Brooker reveals in this new Black Mirror: Bandersnatch featurette, which dives into the rabbit hole that was the making of the ambitious film experiment.

Black Mirror Bandersnatch Featurette: Making Of

Todd Yellin, vice president of product at Netflix, spoke about how he approached Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker with the idea of making an interactive Black Mirror project, following the success of the same experimentation with some of Netflix’s children’s programming. “My initial thought was no, I don’t want to do that,” Brooker revealed. “And then annoyingly, I had an idea that would fit.”

That idea, which would become the basis for the ambitious, if thinly plotted, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch took hold in Brooker’s head, and he accepted the daunting task. But Brooker had no idea going in just how monumental a task Bandersnatch would be.

“When I started out, I thought, ‘Well this will be fairly straightforward, I’m sure I’ll have to draw a flowchart at one point,” Brooker said in the featurette. “Cut to several months later we’ve kind of exponentially started to balloon.”

“Charlie became enamored with the butterfly effect,” Yellin added, detailing the new tools that had to be invented to accommodate Brooker’s ambitious vision. The team involved included Black Mirror producer Annabelle Jones, director David Slade, editor Tony Kearns, and script supervisor Marilyn Kirby, who all described working on the project as something that they had never done before.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is currently streaming on Netflix.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. In 1984, a young programmer begins to question reality as he adapts a sprawling fantasy novel into a video game and soon faces a mind-mangling challenge. Welcome back.

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