Brad Pitt is back as Cliff Booth in Fincher's first full trailer
Netflix dropped the trailer Monday for the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel, written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by David Fincher.
Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Leonardo DiCaprio at the 2019 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood premiere. Photo by Glenn Francis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Netflix put out the first full trailer for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth on Monday. Brad Pitt is back as the stuntman he won an Oscar for playing, and this time David Fincher is the one directing.
The setup is straightforward. It is 1977 in Los Angeles, eight years after the events of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Cliff is not doing stunts anymore. He tends bar, runs a projector, and cleans up problems for people in the movie business. The trailer leans all the way into that. It moves through blackmail, theft, extortion and a couple of bodies, with Cliff drifting through all of it like none of it bothers him.
The odd part is who made it. Quentin Tarantino wrote the script and then handed it off. Tarantino has said his screenplay was basically a giant novel in script form, and that Fincher would have to figure out how to turn it into a movie. So you get Tarantino dialogue and Fincher's cold, precise camera in the same film. That combination alone is worth being curious about.
Who else is in it
Elizabeth Debicki plays a talent agent named Karen Crosby. Scott Caan is a TV star named Charlie Peters. Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Timothy Olyphant and Peter Weller are in the cast too. Leonardo DiCaprio is not. Reports around the production say he passed on a cameo as Rick Dalton, so this one is Pitt carrying it alone.
When you can see it
Netflix is doing something it almost never does. The movie gets an exclusive IMAX run from November 25 through December 8, then lands on Netflix on December 23. Two weeks of real theater exclusivity from a streamer is rare, and it says something about how much the company spent. The budget has been reported at around $200 million.
Tarantino is also putting out a tie-in novel called The Adventures of Cliff Booth in December, before the movie hits streaming. If you want the whole thing the way he first wrote it, that is probably where it lives.
What to watch for: whether the IMAX run actually sells. Netflix has tested theatrical before and always kept it small. A packed two weeks in November would give the studios something to argue about all winter.