Quentin Tarantino was supposed to talk about the sequel. Instead, he showed it.
Friday night at the TCL Chinese Theatre, AFI Fest closed a special IMAX screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with a Q&A — and at the end of it, Tarantino put the choice to the room. “Well, I could talk a little bit about The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, or I could show you the first 17 minutes,” he said, per Deadline's report. The crowd was told to put its phones away, and the opening of the film rolled. David Fincher, who directed it, was in the building.
It was the first time the finished film's opening had been screened for anyone outside the production, and the footage is not being posted anywhere. What the rest of us know about it comes from the people in those seats — principally TheWrap, which published a detailed eyewitness account.
The movie picks up in June 1977, eight years after the original. Per TheWrap, Cliff Booth has left stunt work behind and is managing the New Beverly Cinema — the Los Angeles revival house Tarantino owns in real life — running the projection booth while a fictional blaxploitation picture starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's Roderick “Hot Rod” Harrison plays on the screen. He calls his father, a pawn-shop owner played by Peter Weller. He buys a haul of stolen goods off a pair of loiterers out front, and the haul includes a Best Director Oscar. From there, TheWrap reports, the opening escalates toward gangsters, blackmail, and the movie business.
That is the sequel's premise in miniature. In Netflix's official logline, Cliff is a fixer now — bartending and running the projector when he isn't solving problems for Hollywood's great and not-so-good. The streamer's synopsis teases it in four beats: “Murder, blackmail, theft, extortion. Just another summer in Hollywood.”
The handoff behind the camera is the other half of the story. Tarantino wrote the film but has been open about not wanting his tenth and planned final directorial feature to be a sequel — so the script went to Fincher, who reportedly trimmed some 60 pages from Tarantino's 230-page draft (per Empire). Asked at the Q&A how the movie came about, Tarantino kept it about the character: “I love the Cliff Booth character, I love the way that Brad played him,” he said, describing Cliff as a paperback-style hero moving from one adventure to the next — “Now a misadventure.”
Pitt won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Cliff in the 2019 original, which earned 10 Oscar nominations. He is joined this time by Elizabeth Debicki as a talent agent, Scott Caan as a television star who does his own stunts, Carla Gugino, Abdul-Mateen II, and Weller. Pitt also produces, alongside Ceán Chaffin.
Netflix confirmed the rollout in a press release after the screening: The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth opens in IMAX theaters worldwide on November 25 for a two-week exclusive run, then arrives on Netflix on December 23. Everyone who wasn't in that theater Friday night starts with the big screen — which, for a film that opens with its hero running a revival house, feels about right.
