Netflix killed the interactive movie — but its platform is a still game

Game designer Sam Barlow deserves a lot of credit for driving the “redemption” of FMVs. The full-motion video game format was pioneered in the early ’90s as a cutting-edge visual technique in an age when computer graphics were more simplistic.

But long before that, filmmakers were experimenting with ways to make films more interactive, in theaters and on home DVDs. The efforts met with uneven success — until Black Mirror: Bandersnatch became a hit, simultaneously justifying the interactive format and killing all future attempts at it.

As part of the launch of our documentary The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft, we asked FMV aficionado (…and prolific podcaster… and former Polygon writer) Justin McElroy to sit down with Barlow and talk about the appeal of this strange genre, and the ways it’s changed through the history of entertainment. You can find the whole conversation in the video above.

The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft was recently nominated by the New York Videogame Critics Circle for a New York Game Award for Best Games Journalism. You can learn more about the New York Game Awards and our fellow nominees here.

Sam Barlow: There were a couple of movies in theaters in the ’90s where you got the big plastic buttons. And they were just terrible.

Justin McElroy: I’m Your Man is one that I know was on — you could get it on DVD. It was an interactive DVD, one of those types of things where you could make the choices with your home remote.

Barlow: There’s such a good talk, I think it’s online — I think I want to say Brian Moriarty did it at NYU — about interactive movies where he’s like, “Hey, people have been trying to do this thing for ages.” And going back to the early fake interactive movies. William Castle, the great producer, did a movie called Mr. Sardonicus. And the gimmick of that movie — because he loved his gimmicks — was when you went into the theater, you were given a big — maybe it was like a big hand, or some sort of big prop. At the end of the movie, the character turns to the audience, so we’re establishing that already, and says, “Hey, what do you think? Should this big evil villain, Sardonicus, should he be punished or should we forgive him? You, the audience, will now decide.” And everyone would have to raise or lower their thing to signal if they wanted to kill the guy. And one of the ushers would make a show of tallying the votes… and then disappear. And then the movie would play out, and the ending you got would depend on the vote. Here’s the thing: William Castle understood his audience. He knew the vote was always going to be to punish. So it was a linear movie. It was just a movie that waited three minutes, and went, The audience has decided to punish Mr. Sardonicus.

McElroy: Well, just these past couple of weeks, Megalopolis was released with an interactive scene with an audience member who’s supposed to come up and do a line in the film. That’s an interactive element.

Barlow: I still need to watch that movie, but I will say the stuff I’ve seen looks like a ’90s interactive movie. Like some of the back projection, the CGI, and certainly the performances.

McElroy: It’s up to about eight CDs.

Barlow: Jon Voight is the exact guy you would’ve cast in a ’90s FMV at the time.

McElroy: I think his disc had some scratches on it. Jon was having a rough time.

Barlow: You’d be like, “Could we get some Hollywood talent in our FMV game?” And they’d be like, “Well, Tom Cruise isn’t returning our calls, but Jon Voight is down as long as we donate some money towards the Trump campaign or something.”

McElroy: Do you wish more people were sort of exploring this space, this interactive cinema area? Do you feel like there is a lot of room for iteration and growth, or do you think that it is going to remain a sort of subgenre or even sort of a branching media between two different types of media?

Barlow: If I don’t be cynical for a second, I get very excited about the possibilities. And I think when Her Story blew up, I got a lot of meetings with people in Hollywood and stuff, at a time when Netflix were sort of disrupting things and lots of people were like, Fuck, we need to figure out how we are going to do the digital thing. We need to figure out how we’re going to get gamers watching television again. Because they don’t. They’re too busy on their phones, right? And I was like, This is really cool, because I think there is so much interesting stuff that could be done on the — I’m going to say TV side — versus the game side. And the tech is kind of there, and I think there could be a huge, interesting shift that would create really interesting things.

Then in the — how many years has it been now? — nearly 10 years since, I’ve just seen like, Oh no, the world of Hollywood is so risk-averse that… I kept being told time and time again: “We don’t want to be number one. We want to be number two. Let somebody else break the ground, and then we can step in.” So I would hear things like, “Well, do you know what? When Steven Soderbergh brings out Mosaic, then the floodgates will open.”

Mosaic came out and didn’t change things. I think you look at Bandersnatch and that came out [on Netflix] and I think that kind of killed a lot of these discussions because it was almost — if you were trying to kill that movement dead, Bandersnatch was a great way of doing it, because it was very successful. The Hollywood mindset goes, OK, let’s replicate that. Well, hang on a minute: It worked because it was Black Mirror, which was an IP that allowed you to have fun with technology, have that sort of humor to it and just that sort of self-awareness. The story was about ’80s Choose Your Own Adventure games.

McElroy: Right, the form and the content are sort of [baked in].

Barlow: And you’ve seen Netflix struggle. They were like, Oh, we’re going to make tons of these now. Well actually everything done since doesn’t have those affordances. So that structure of essentially the Choose Your Own Adventure TV show breaks down when you can’t nod and wink at the camera, when it isn’t self-referential, when it’s not about the literal thing that it is. And so I think it kind of killed things because all the other people in the industry went, Well, hey, Netflix did a really good job of that and it was really successful, but I just don’t see how — like, it’s a one and done. And I think that allowed people to retreat back.

[Ed.’s note: In December 2024, two months after this conversation, Netflix pulled all but four of its interactive programs. Bandersnatch is one of the remaining titles.]

Whereas […] take Netflix, they’ve — to use a phrase I hate — they’ve gamified the experience of choosing what to watch, right? I’ve stopped doing this now because I want to escape my digital hell. But there was a period where if I had a free evening and my family were out or something and I got to choose what was on TV, I’d be like, OK, Daddy’s going to watch something cool on the television. And I would sit down, and 45 minutes later I’m still paging through Netflix, looking at the stuff, seeing the algorithmic choices. So they’ve done a really good job of making the “browsing the shelf” experience feel very interactive. It’s personalized, right? I get different shows pushed to me. Not only do I get different shows, I get different thumbnails. The funny thing of like, you get the stuff right, where it’s like, the thumbnail says Godfather, and then it’s a picture of one of the female characters from The Godfather that doesn’t even have a speaking line, because the algorithm has decided, Oh, you like things with women in them, we need to push that on you.

And then the other one that delighted me was when there was a Netflix show, Love, Death & Robots. And a cool thing with an anthology show is you have to decide what order to put the episodes in. And this is a fascinating problem. If you think of a traditional linear setup, it’s like, you can’t have the best episode first because you’re going to then kind of fail to meet expectations. But you want a good episode.

McElroy: [Laughs] Not too good!

Barlow: The episode that will hook people, but still give us room to have the best episode. And Netflix being algorithmic and all this were like, Hey, we know how to solve for this problem. We can run A/B tests and we can try different algorithmic episode orders and see which works best. So they did this for Love, Death & Robots. There was a journalist for one of the tech sites who was gay. He watches Love, Death & Robots. First episode he gets is the quote-unquote “gay episode,” and his flatmate is also watching Love, Death & Robots, and the episode he gets is the quote-unquote “extremely heterosexual” episode, and the two of them are like, Wait, fuck, does Netflix know that I’m gay? And then you’re like, Yeah, it probably does. If Netflix is watching what I’m watching, you could make assumptions. And then they were extremely creeped out. So this guy wrote this article of like, “Holy hell, Big Brother is watching. Netflix knows that I’m gay and is now targeting content based on my sexuality. This is kind of scary.” To which Netflix had to immediately step in and be like, “We weren’t, it was random. We were just randomly choosing episodes.”

McElroy: “But also this is a really good idea, and we are going to write this down, if that’s OK with everybody.”

Barlow: I was like, There’s something so cool… It’s almost like building to a kind of War of the Worlds moment of like, Hey, my video content, which historically has been static and safe and behind my TV screen, is somehow aware and alive.

We’ll be running more excerpts from this conversation between Sam Barlow and Justin McElroy each weekend, for the next few weeks.