If you’re still in the post-Christmas, pre-New Year’s holiday haze with lots of down time and a whole lot of nothing to do, you may consider turning at some point to Netflix to scratch that itch. Precisely for this reason, new content keeps getting added into the pipeline at the streaming giant, with the service reportedly set to offer up something pretty wild and original as soon as this Friday: That choose-your-own adventure-style Black Mirror movie you may have heard was coming.
Indeed, because you’ll be able to direct the action in a way, choosing from different scenarios with your remote, the filmmakers have included some 312 minutes of interactive footage for Bandersnatch. That’s the title of the film — which will give Black Mirror fans something to tide them over until the release of the show’s fifth season perhaps in 2019.
It’s a safe bet nobody wished you a dystopian Christmas, but it looks like we’re going to get one anyway thanks to this new 90-minute film, the plot of which according to Esquire focuses on a young programmer who turns a fantasy novel into a game. “Soon, reality and virtual worlds are mixed and start to create confusion.”
We know who some of the stars are thanks to an image from the movie that’s leaked. David Slade directs a cast that includes Will Poulter from We’re the Millers, Fionn Whitehead from Dunkirk and Asim Chaudhry, from People Just Do Nothing. Per Slashfilm today: “The image and leaked details appear to confirm the ’80s setting of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, which aligns with fan theories that Bandersnatch would be set in the world of video games. “Bandersnatch” is the name of a video game listed in the season 3 episode “Playtest,” and was also the title of a real-life video game developed by Imagine Software in 1984 that was never released to the public. The word itself comes from the Lewis Carroll book Alice in Wonderland, one of the foremost stories about the blurring between fantasy and reality.”
As a caveat to all of this, none of it has been confirmed by Netflix as of yet. So pay attention to the landing page that folks have already spotted for Bandersnatch to see if it drops there on December 28.
