Black Mirror Creator Charlie Brooker Talks About Unmade Bandersnatch Sequel “Banderstruck” He Still Wants to Do

Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror, has shared that he once planned a sequel to the interactive movie Bandersnatch. The project was called Banderstruck, but it was never made — at least not yet.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Brooker revealed, “I did work out the storyline for a completely different sequel for Bandersnatch, which was going to be called Banderstruck, but I never got to do it.”

Brooker didn’t share what the story was about, but he hinted that it would have taken place in a different time period. When asked if he could reveal what Banderstruck would’ve explored, he simply smiled and said, “No. Because I might still revisit that well in some way, but it was about a slightly different era.”

Bandersnatch came out in 2018 and was a choose-your-own-adventure-style movie on Netflix. It let viewers make choices for the main character, Stefan Butler, a young video game developer in the 1980s.

Fionn Whitehead played Stefan, while Will Poulter played Colin Ritman, a famous game designer, and Asim Chaudhry played Mohan Thakur, Stefan’s boss at Tuckersoft.

The story had many possible endings, and some were very dark. Poulter’s character Colin became a fan favorite, even though his fate depended on the choices viewers made.

Now, both Poulter and Chaudhry have returned to Black Mirror in season 7, in an episode called “Plaything.” While it features their characters, Brooker says it’s not a direct sequel to Bandersnatch.

“I was kicking around a sort of idea, which I might still revisit,” Brooker said about Banderstruck. “I’m agnostic as to what it was going to be.”

He explained that “Plaything” was originally just a story about video games in the 1990s — a world Brooker knows well, since he used to be a video game journalist.

“Plaything” takes place 10 years after Bandersnatch. It follows a journalist named Cameron who is assigned to write about Colin Ritman’s new game, Thronglets. The game includes digital creatures that become more powerful and start affecting Cameron in strange ways.

Brooker said, “I knew I wanted Cameron to meet this programmer, but [I thought], wait a minute, I created this character, Colin Ritman, played by Will Poulter in Bandersnatch. I loved that character, and Mohan Thakur, Asim Chaudhry, who played his boss in the original Bandersnatch, I’m going to write the best version of that.”

While there’s no official word yet on whether Banderstruck will ever happen, Brooker hasn’t ruled it out. Fans of Bandersnatch and the wider Black Mirror universe will just have to wait and see.

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