‘Black Mirror’ Season 5 Delayed Because of the Complexity of ‘Bandersnatch’

Fans of Black Mirror may want to spend a little more time immersing themselves in the franchise’s interactive stand-alone movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch a little bit longer. Season 5 of the Netflix anthology series is coming — but thanks to the movie, it’s been delayed.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, co-executive producer Annabel Jones revealed that Bandersnatch took an “enormous” amount of creative time and effort which means they had to shift Season 5’s arrival. It’s still expected for 2019, though its actual launch date and total episode count has not been released.

For those not yet familiar, Bandersnatch is a unique offering within the Black Mirror franchise. The movie is viewer interactive, meaning that at multiple points within the story viewers are prompted to make a choice that directs where the story will go next. In Bandersnatch, the film, which is set in 1984, follows the life of Stefan (Fionn Whitehead,) a young video game developer who descends into madness while working on a new game based on a fantasy book that itself is set up as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. During the movie viewers make seemingly mundane choices — such as what cereal to eat or music to listen to — as well as more huge choices, specifically about Stefan’s actions that lead to one of what Netflix classifies as the five “main” endings.

Creating all of the reportedly over one trillion possible versions of the story was so complex it required Netflix to develop their own in-house storytelling tool, Branch Manager, so that series creator Charlie Brooker could map the story out to ultimately bring it to life — or lives, as it were. The result? Viewers can spend anywhere from an hour to two and a half hours exploring the world and coming to a variety of conclusions.

With all of that going into making Bandersnatch, it’s not surprising that Season 5 may have a bit of a delay. However, while fans are left waiting and wondering when they will get more one thing seems to be pretty clear: Season 5 isn’t likely to contain sequel episodes.

In the “Inside Black Mirror” book, series creator Charlie Brooker discussed the possibility that, at some point, the show might revisit some of the series’ most popular episodes, though he specifically noted that things would only be revisited “if there was a compelling reason to do so.” That didn’t stop rumors of sequel episodes in Season 5, though, which prompted Brooker to reply in a now-deleted tweet “nope”.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is now streaming on Netflix. Season 5 of Black Mirror will launch in 2019.