Quentin Tarantino surprised the crowd during a Q&A and screening of his 10-time Oscar-nominated Once Upon a Time in Hollywood on Friday night at AFI Fest in Los Angeles by screening the first 17 minutes of its sequel The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth.
It marks the first public look at the film, a follow-up to Hollywood that Tarantino scripted and David Fincher directed. Brad Pitt revises his Oscar-winning role as Booth, a stuntman and sidekick to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in the original 2019 film.
Netflix is gearing up for the Cliff Booth theatrical release November 25 in Imax before hitting the streamer beginning December 23.
“Well, I could talk a little bit about The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, or I could show you the first 17 minutes,” Tarantino said at the end of his special-event Q&A session at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. He had just been asked about the film and how it came about, and if he had anything else to say before the conversation wrapped.
He then stood up as the crowd began to figure out what was coming.
Here’s the moment:
Cliff Booth fast-forwards to 1977 from the original film’s 1969 timeline. The new logline: Los Angeles no longer needs a hippie-slaying stuntman the way it did. But Hollywood will always have problems, problems that can only be solved by someone with Cliff’s unique (occasionally extralegal) abilities. When he’s not earning his keep bartending or as a projectionist, Cliff Booth is a fixer — solving situations for Hollywood’s great and, sometimes, not so good.
The pic also stars Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Peter Weller, Matt Groove, JB Tadena, Corey Fogelmanis and Karren Karagulian.
Buzz for the film has been building since it was announced in 2024 that Pitt and Fincher were teaming on the project that Tarantino originally wanted to direct. Fincher said earlier this week that he had to cut 60 pages from Tarantino’s script, after he said the first draft he read was 230 pages. “It was essentially two movies,” Fincher told Empire.
The final cut of the film, Fincher said, has a runtime of around 2 1/2 hours.
During tonight’s AFI Fest event, Tarantino also talked about his upcoming play The Popinjay Cavalier, which will premiere in London’s West End next spring. Sacha Baron Cohen will star in the director’s first stage play, which begins previews February 23 and opens March 18 at the Phoenix Theatre.
Patrick Hipes contributed to this report.
