This week,Netflixpulled Black Mirror: Bandersnatch from its streaming service. The interactive sci-fi special launched on the service in 2018 to a positive reception from both critics and audiences. This is a huge problem from a preservation standpoint because there is literally nowhere else to play it.
This is part of a wave of deletions at the streamer, as Netflix has also removed the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt film, Kimmy vs the Reverend, another interactive special which debuted in 2020, shortly after pulling most other interactive media at the end of last year, including Cat Burglar, the cartoon made by the Bandersnatch team. Both are unavailable on any other platforms.
Netflix — with occasional exceptions — doesn’t put its original content out physically. It cracks the emergency glass occasionally, but only for huge hits like Wednesday orStranger Things, where the potential money from the home video market is too much to ignore.
Even then, only Stranger Things' first two seasons are available physically.
Physical Releases Are Essential For Preservation
Black Mirror and Kimmy Schmidt might seem uniquely hard to preserve because they’re interactive. But the choices you make in Bandersnatch and Kimmy vs the Reverend aren’t really any more complicated than ones in DVD games like Scene It. Even if, for some reason, putting these shows on DVDs isn’t feasible, Netflix could put in a small amount of work to preserve these specials on PC or consoles - it hasalready expanded into gaming through mobile apps, after all. It just doesn’t care.
So it makes sense for Netflix to only make it available there. Sure, it would make some money from the physical sales, but not the right kind of money; one-time money, not the money of repeated, monthly payments.
Why Not Just Delete It?
‘Who cares?’ you might say. ‘That’s just their business model.’ And yeah, sure, Netflix and Apple are paying to produce this content, so they get to set the terms for how it will be seen. But sometimes – often, even – corporations decide it’s better for you not to be able to see something at all.
Remember Batgirl? The superhero flick, directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, the pair behind the two most recent Bad Boys movies, doesn’t exist in any real sense. Warner Bros. decided it was more cost effective to delete the film and claim it as a tax write-off than it was to release it.
The same thingnearly happened with WB’s Coyote Vs. Acme, before Ketchup Entertainment salvaged it by buying the rights.
Sure, WB can decide what to do with something it funded, but what about the hundreds of people who worked on that movie and now have nothing to show for it? What’s happening with Black Mirror Bandersnatch is less extreme, in that it actually did get to release for a while, but is still a version of the same problem. Then again, in some ways, having seen something and never being able to see it again is worse than never getting to see it.
Netflix produced the interactive film, then their business model shifted away from interactive specials, in favor of more traditional games. Bandersnatch is now a weird edge case. Rather than preserving it as an interesting example of its history, Netflix has determined it’s cleaner to get rid of it. That sucks. Netflix shouldn’t be able to do it. But unless something substantial changes in the way streamers do business, they’ll keep doing it. Minor profit will always trump art.
