The fifth season of Black Mirror was delayed due to Bandersnatch

In a surprise move, Netflix released BLACK MIRROR: BANDERSNATCH on December 28th, but the incredible amount of work which went into the interactive feature-film has meant that the fifth season of Black Mirror has been pushed a little further back.

"We knew going into it that [BANDERSNATCH] would be difficult and challenging and more complicated than a normal film that we would do. Even then, we underestimated," Black Mirror creator and writer Charlie Brooker said while speaking with THR. "As the story expanded, I like to say that the story got longer and it got wider. So the whole thing started expanding a bit like an inflatable life raft in a small room." A release date for the fifth season of Black Mirror was never officially announced, so we don't know just when it was originally planned to debut, but Netflix confirmed that the fifth season is still set to be released sometime in 2019. Charlie Booker said that BANDERSNATCH actually came out of a story-idea meeting for the fifth season and that he assumed it would be like making two episodes of the TV series in terms of complexity. Turns out, it was more like making four.

A lot of that is because literally the tools that we needed to create it didn’t exist at the start, so we were learning as we went… We knew going into it that this would impact our time, but it hasn’t stopped us from doing other films. I think it’s fair to say that it took us more time and effort than we had initially anticipated.

As Charlie Booker didn't have access to Netflix's interactive branching technology at first, he explained that there was "quite a bit of trial and error" in the beginning as they discovered what "would and wouldn't work." The Black Mirror creator continued, "It’s not like editing a standard film where you can often rearrange scenes or cut things. In some respects you have more freedom because you have so many different stories that you can be telling. But then you are restricted in new ways. There’s a whole new language you have to learn and on top of that, you have to write and film so much more."

BLACK MIRROR: BANDERSNATCH is now playing on Netflix. Have you checked it out yet? If so, what did you think?