Brad Pitt's 'Cliff Booth' Just Lost Regal and Cinemark's IMAX Screens

The biggest film Netflix has ever sent to theaters just got turned away from a large share of the biggest screens in the country. Variety and Deadline reported on October 30 that Regal and Cinemark will not play The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth on their IMAX screens. The film opens November 25.

The movie is not the problem. David Fincher directs it from a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, and Brad Pitt returns as Cliff Booth, the stuntman who won him an Oscar in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — a $393.9 million hit in 2019, per Box Office Mojo. The sequel picks Booth up in 1977, eight years later, working as a Hollywood fixer: the man the studios call when a star's problem cannot reach the papers. It is Netflix's first IMAX release, booked for a two-week exclusive run before it streams on December 23, and its official trailer is already selling the scale of it.

The Objection Is the Calendar

Two weeks on a chain's best screens, across Thanksgiving, for a film its own customers can watch at home four weeks after it opens. Cinemark CEO Sean Gamble said it plainly on the company's earnings call on Tuesday, as TheWrap reported: "We don't believe the proposed release model is constructive for the broader theatrical ecosystem." Regal's senior vice president of US content, Brooks LeBoeuf, said the chain's premium screens are "among our most valuable assets" and that "shortened theatrical windows have a direct impact on those decisions." Both chains are keeping their IMAX screens on The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which opens November 20 and holds their full support into its second weekend — the exact frame Cliff Booth wanted.

What It Costs, and Where You Can Still See It

IndieWire's count puts the refusal at roughly 120 screens — about 100 of Regal's IMAX houses and closer to 20 of Cinemark's. What remains is still a real release: about 550 screens worldwide and roughly 200 in the United States, carried by AMC and independent theaters. Tickets went on sale November 2. But if your local IMAX wears a Regal or Cinemark sign, this film is not playing on it. You drive to an AMC, or you wait for December 23.

A Fight This Film Was Built to End

The irony is that no film was better positioned to settle the streaming-versus-theaters argument. Tarantino wrote the sequel but did not want to direct it — his tenth and final film will not be a sequel — and Sony Pictures chairman Tom Rothman told Variety there was exactly one other director Tarantino trusted with the script: David Fincher, whose deal is exclusive to Netflix. So the movie went to the streamer, and the streamer's terms became the story. Pitt has said he handed Fincher the script on a plane and had his answer by the time they landed, per Esquire. Tarantino rolled out the first footage himself last month, screening the opening 17 minutes at AFI Fest.

Even the date is borrowed. Netflix had earmarked November 25 for Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew; when that film moved to February with a full 45-day theatrical window, Cliff Booth took the slot — with two weeks. One of those windows is what the chains say they want. The other is the one they just turned down.

The Screen Desk's read: Netflix wanted IMAX's prestige at streaming's terms, and the chains just named their price in public. If Cliff Booth packs AMC's screens for two weeks, short windows gain leverage everywhere; if it plays soft, Regal and Cinemark called it. November 25 is now a verdict on the window itself.