LOS ANGELES — The first trailer for “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” began playing in theaters this weekend, attached to Resident Evil, which opened to franchise-record numbers on the same days. The IMAX-exclusive release is set for November 25, with a Netflix debut following December 23.
The fact that it exists at all is the story. Quentin Tarantino has written exactly one sequel in a career spanning films that people still argue about at dinner tables. The last time he handed a screenplay to another director was “Jackie Brown” in 1997, and that was an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, not a continuation of his own characters. For “Cliff Booth,” the director is David Fincher. Tarantino told The Church of Tarantino podcast last August that Fincher is one of the two best directors working. “The other being myself,” he added, and the trailer suggests neither claim was rhetorical.
The footage opens in 1977 Hollywood, eight years on from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Cliff Booth is no longer a stunt double without a movie to work on. He has found a new career as a fixer, and the trailer illustrates what that means in approximately six seconds: a man through a plate-glass window, a handshake over a briefcase, Timothy Olyphant reprising his role as James Stacy in what appears to be a casino. The voiceover, in Pitt’s unhurried drawl, runs: “Murder, blackmail, theft, extortion. Just another summer in Hollywood.”
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” won Pitt an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2020 and remains Tarantino’s highest-grossing film at over $370 million worldwide. It arrived at a moment when revisionist period cinema was having a cultural second act. A sequel, episode, or continuation, whatever Tarantino chooses to call it, arrives in a market that has consistently rewarded nostalgia ever since. That the original was a love letter to a Hollywood that never quite existed makes the timing of its Prime Video debut this Thursday, September 25, feel like deliberate stage-setting.
Joining Pitt in the cast: Elizabeth Debicki, whose involvement signals something more substantial than a cameo; Scott Caan; Carla Gugino; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; Peter Weller; and Olyphant as Stacy, the actor whose real-life career arc after a 1971 motorcycle accident gave the original film some of its most textured moments. No character names have been confirmed for most of the new arrivals.
Fincher brings to the project a filmography built on studies in institutional decay and the violence beneath California’s surface. “Zodiac.” “Gone Girl.” “The Social Network.” It is a body of work that interrogates power and the stories powerful people tell about themselves. Whether that sensibility fits the golden-haze revisionism Tarantino built into the original is precisely the question the trailer raises without resolving. The visual register of the footage, all warm shadows and worn-leather interiors, looks more like Tarantino than Fincher. That gap between Fincher’s known aesthetic and what the footage actually shows is perhaps the most interesting thing in those two minutes. Fincher’s Hollywood has rarely been a place people romanticize.
The theatrical strategy tells its own story. A two-week IMAX window before a Netflix debut is the standard playbook for a film both parties want taken seriously, though Netflix intends to own the title outright by Christmas. Amazon Prime Video added “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” to its streaming library this Thursday, three months before the sequel arrives on a competing service. Whether that sequencing was coordinated or coincidental has not been addressed by either studio.
A companion novel, titled “The Adventures of Cliff Booth” by Tarantino and published by HarperCollins, is scheduled for December 8, landing between the IMAX run and the Netflix premiere. Tarantino announced the book on September 15. Whether the novel and the film share storylines or diverge, as his first novelization of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” did from the film itself, has not been disclosed.
What the trailer withholds is as telling as what it shows. There is no clear antagonist, no mention of Sharon Tate, and no reference to the events of the original film’s final act. That last absence is almost certainly deliberate. The first film’s ending worked partly because nobody expected it. “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” arrives carrying both the advantage and the burden of an audience that now knows exactly what Cliff Booth is capable of, and what he can get away with. Tarantino told that same podcast last year that he needed to not know what he was doing going in, to be in uncharted territory. Whether handing the camera to Fincher achieves that for him, or simply relocates the uncertainty to the audience, opens in IMAX in nine weeks.
