Quentin Tarantino Has Discussed Once Upon A Time In Hollywood Mini-Series
Is QT headed back to TV?
The New York Times' Kyle Buchanan recently posted outtakes from his conversation with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star Brad Pitt to his Twitter, and one throwaway remark from the actor teased that director Quentin Tarantino has kicked around the possibility of expanding the flick into a television miniseries.
Pitt's comment came at the tail end of a long discourse concerning his affinity for the theatrical experience, as opposed to the streaming, binge-watching ways of those darn kids these days. However, the star did note that the serialized approach can be a boon, allowing for more fully developed characters as audiences spend time with them over the course of one or several seasons.
He also pointed out that virtually all movies end up with interesting scenes getting axed in the editing process due to the need to conform to a standard run time, which brought him to the unique way in which Tarantino repackaged his 2015 flick The Hateful Eight for Netflix.
"I think it's interesting that Tarantino took Hateful Eight and ostensibly repurposed it as a three-part series," he said. "It's almost the best of both worlds: you have the cinema experience that exists, but you can actually put more content in the series format."
Asked if Tarantino had ever discussed taking the same tack with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pitt replied, "Yeah, he's talked about it. It's a pretty arousing idea."
At this point, we feel the need to point out that a) The Hateful Eight was split into four episodes, not three, and b) Pitt must be operating with a pretty different definition of the word "arousing" from the rest of us.
But, in case you didn't realize it, he's mostly correct. While the theatrical cut of The Hateful Eight is available on Netflix for your streaming pleasure, an extended, reformatted edition has also hit the streamer. The miniseries version splits the flick into episodes entitled "Last Stage to Red Rock," "Minnie's Haberdashery," "Domergue's Got A Secret," and "The Last Chapter," each of which run right around 50 minutes.
It's actually an ingenious approach, as The Hateful Eight is famously really... really... long, even without any extra material added in. The theatrical cut of the movie ran for an eye-watering two hours and 48 minutes, three hours and seven minutes in its 70mm "Road Show" version (many of the theaters that screened the longer cut actually included an intermission halfway through).
The episodic version contains nearly an hour of new scenes, and if we know QT, the director likely has at least that much extra footage that he'd love to fold in to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. That flick is just a hair shorter than The Hateful Eight (two hours, 40 minutes), and has much more of an emphasis on Tarantino's trademark intertwined character arcs and storylines, meaning that it would probably lend itself even better to an episodic reformatting.
On top of that, the movie is a smash hit. While The Hateful Eight struggled to even pass the $50 million dollar mark domestically, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is behind only 2012's Django Unchained and 2009's Inglorious Basterds in terms of Tarantino's worldwide box office receipts. It's safe to say that fan interest in a miniseries rendition of the film would be high — and hey, rather than feeling like they're sitting through an interminably long movie, those darn kids can just pretend they're binging an entire season of a series at once, as they are wont to do. (Okay, yes: so are we, but that's neither here nor there.)
At any rate, the very fact that Tarantino has put the idea out there has us thinking that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Redux will probably actually happen. If it does, we have a request. Mr. Tarantino, if you're reading this: how about making one entire segment just the uncut episode of that cheesy '60s variety show that Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton appears on, complete with commercials? We realize you may have to shoot some new footage, but we'd really appreciate it.