The Removal of ‘Bandersnatch’ From Netflix Marks the Sobering End of an Era

Without a Blu-ray or DVD release, Netflix’s one-of-a-kind experience enters into a strange limbo

May 13, 2025

Will Poulter and Fionn Whitehead looking out over a balcony in Bandersnatch / Netflix — Netflix

Regardless of when a show or movie came out, it’s typical to talk about it in the present tense. Whether or not actors have passed away by the time we view their work, their performances continue to shine all the same. A light isn’t suddenly extinguished just because the people who hung it up for the world to see are no longer here.

So when we speak about It’s a Wonderful Life or Casablanca, we do it with a vocabulary that’s generally reserved for the living. We talk about the music that soars, and the actors that excel, and the themes that resonate.

But in the modern age, there are shows and movies that live their entire lives within streaming services. When they’re removed, it can mean the erasure of whole universes. It can turn art into something that’s most logically referred to in the past tense.

Bandersnatch has become the latest victim of this verbal reclassification. Released in 2018, it was a standalone movie within the Black Mirror world that could be watched on Netflix, and was an impressive exhibition of technology. It could be appreciated until today, when Netflix shuttered the digital doors on all of its remaining interactive content, and this one-of-a-kind story unceremoniously vanished without a trace.

From the opening, Bandersnatch effectively blurred the line between spectator and participant. Viewers were tasked with keeping their remotes close at their side as they picked between a series of options on the screen that led to different outcomes.

Some of the variations were trivial. The cereal the protagonist ate in the morning — that we directed him to eat — had little effect on the overall trajectory of the plot.

Nor did the mixtape that he listened to on his commute, nor the album he purchased from the record store. Each resulted in tiny, branching shifts, some of which were so subtle that they practically demanded a magnifying glass for viewers to discern them. But others were elegant illustrations of “the butterfly effect,” and the way that seemingly minor decisions can culminate in colossal changes. Bandersnatch also offers an ingeniously palpable presentation of the multiverse theory, and the way that different versions of ourselves could coexist within parallel timelines.

From the opening scene, foreshadowing abounded at every corner and Chekhov’s guns were planted all over. Sometimes, the device came across as in-your-face overt in a dystopian world that otherwise thrives on subtlety. But the direct-to-a-near-fault nature was well-suited to the interactive side-outing. It prevented Bandersnatch from feeling passive.

The varied routes that audience members would take led to completely distinct endings. In some versions, seemingly significant objects or events were no more than red herrings and smoke screens. In others, the rifles mounted on the mantle fired before the final scene.

As the story wore on, it gradually became clear what an intricate web of decisions participants were left to parse between. With all permutations accounted for, there were a staggering total of over a trillion possible directions the arc could take.

There were some choices viewers could make that would cause the story to end before it had even begun, and others that would draw the story out for well over an hour. With each version of each scene totaled, Bandersnatch was nearly six cumulative hours of content— making it what was arguably the longest movie on the entire streaming platform. And each new hour spent with it only deepened the experience.

While quickly dismissed as a gimmick by some, those who sat with Bandersnatch through more than a few of its possible endings began to see what an innovative offering it was. One of the unfortunate burdens of the interactive format, though, is that many simply failed to appreciate its true depths. They didn’t realize that to follow it through to only one of its conclusions was the equivalent of fast-forwarding through its most poignant messaging completely — committing the cinematic injustice of walking out of a movie mid-screening.

As we began the Bandersnatch experience anew and confronted the same scenarios — or slightly altered versions of them — there was a liminal unease that it instilled in participants. It induced a kind of temporal vertigo that’s reminiscent of Bill Murray’s plight in Groundhog Day. It was equal parts familiar and unsettling.

Sometimes, how a decision would affect the story was left up to chance; for one viewer, a choice would yield a different result than for another. Sometimes, the story punished us for choosing what seemed like the “right” thing, flipping our moral expectations on their head. Sometimes, the narrative bent back on itself entirely, forcing us to relive scenes with only slight variations — as if the movie was enough of a living, breathing entity to test our observation skills.

Sometimes, decisions led to the fourth wall being shattered into pieces. Other times they resulted in martial arts brawls breaking out, or a macabre variety of murders being committed. A couple of the paths led toward discordant resolves. Some endings are so well hidden that even the creators admitted they didn’t know how to access them — despite having written and filmed them. (After briefly trying to disentangle the network of possibilities in pursuit of a specific outcome, I can attest that this confusion is all too feasible.)

Actual chart that guided you toward each of Bandersnatch’s known endings / IGN

Adding insult to this streaming injustice is the fact that Bandersnatch is one of the only stories within the Black Mirror universe to ever get what can fairly be called a sequel. Season 7’s “Plaything” begins with the same computerized audio that plays in the buried post-credit scene of Bandersnatch and features multiple returning characters, most notably, Will Poulter’s Colin Ritman. Though “Plaything” doesn’t offer viewers the ability to choose between different paths, Ritman’s reprised role is one of the most fulfilling Easter eggs that the minds behind the dystopian anthology world have delivered to date.

Bandersnatch never had a DVD or Blu-ray release, and has yet to be purchased by another streaming service or distributor. So as of this writing, its fate may be forever sealed — archived in some inaccessible corner of the cloud.

One of the strangest aspects of Bandersnatch’s removal from Netflix is the way that the decisions serves as a self-indictment — a proud admission that some of Black Mirror’s most scathing commentary on the corporate world is correct. In the past two seasons alone, “Common People” criticized the way that services like Netflix grow worse over time, and “Joan Is Awful” provided a damning exploration of the way that our rights as viewers and consumers are violated by streaming giants. (Both of these episodes remain available on Netflix today and can still safely be referred to in the present tense.)

What happened to Bandersnatch isn’t a mere licensing quirk. It’s a symptom of a problem that has affected more and more of us.

As we’ve bought into memberships and streaming services only to watch them proliferate with advertisements and remove our favorite content as they soar in prices, what happened to Bandersnatch is hardly an isolated incident. It’s just among the most wildly unique stories to which this travesty has occurred.

But there’s something that’s quintessentially Black Mirror about this loss. A story about choice, control, and illusion has been stripped away by the very forces that Bandersnatch warned us about (in at least a few of its endings). Perhaps Netflix spokesperson Chrissy Kelleher summed up the situation best when he told The Verge that it was deleted because “the technology served its purpose.”

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