Black Mirror: Bandersnatch might be the most ambitious Black Mirror project to date, but it comes at a cost. Production on Netflix’s interactive sci-fi film was so involved that Black Mirror‘s producers had to delay show’s upcoming fifth season.
Producer Annabel Jones confirmed the delay in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Netflix currently lists a 2019 premiere date for Black Mirror season 5, but neither Jones, series creator Charlie Brooker, nor the streaming service has offered any more details.
With five official endings (each of which comes in a few different iterations) and thousands of possible story permutations, Bandersnatch “is like taking a whole Black Mirror season with the different genres and experiences, and putting them into one film,” Jones said. The movie-game hybrid, which lets players decide how its story will unfold choose-your-own-adventure style, took as long to produce as a full Black Mirror season, too. According to The New York Times, Bandersnatch consumed all of Brooker and Jones’ energy for a full year.
Black Mirror debuted in 2011 on the United Kingdom’s Channel 4, where it aired for two seasons. In 2016, Netflix brought the satirical sci-fi show to an international audience. Black Mirror won Emmys for Outstanding Television Movie and Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special in 2017 for the episode San Junipero and picked up another writing Emmy for the Star Trek send-up USS Callister a year later.
Bandersnatch is Netflix’s highest-profile foray into the world of interactive storytelling yet, but it’s not the first. A Shrek spinoff called Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale hit the service in 2017 and was quickly followed by branching episodes of the children’s show Stretch Armstrong and Netflix’s animated Buddy Thunderstruck. A few weeks before Bandersnatch‘s premiere, Telltale Games also brought a special version of Minecraft: Story Mode to Netflix in late 2018, although future collaborations with Netflix seem unlikely; Telltale closed in 2018, canceling its Stranger Things spinoff in the process.
When Black Mirror returns, Brooker claims that the stories will be “more optimistic,” skewing away from the series’ signature dystopian aesthetic. You might be waiting for a while to see that, however, so feel free to revisit the best Black Mirror episodes in the meantime — or just run through Bandersnatch a few more times. Chances are, there is still a lot there to discover.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?