Netflix released the second trailer for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth on Nov. 6, and the cold open is a Bruce Lee joke, not a Rick Dalton mention. “You heard the story about Bruce Lee getting his ass kicked by a stuntman?” a voice asks before the trailer gets around to explaining who Cliff Booth is without Rick Dalton standing next to him.
That ordering matters because Leonardo DiCaprio is not returning for the sequel, which leaves the marketing department with half a duo to sell. Cliff gets his own line on the Bruce Lee scandal, “It’s been exaggerated over the years,” he says, and the Dalton question gets answered with a joke instead of an actor: Elizabeth Debicki’s talent agent asks what broke up the stunt partnership, and Booth answers, “Oh, Rick got too fat for me to double him anymore.” (One line, and the entire previous movie gets filed under backstory.)
The 141-minute film is set in 1977, eight years past the Manson-adjacent 1969 of the original, and Cliff now bartends, runs a projector and takes fixer jobs on the side, by Netflix’s own plot rundown. Debicki’s Karen Crosby hires him to manage her client, TV star Charlie Peters (Scott Caan), who insists on doing his own stunts. Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Peter Weller and a returning Timothy Olyphant as James Stacy round out a cast built around people David Fincher described as “agents who don’t want to be agents, stuntmen who have aged out, small-screen actors who have massive egos.”
Fincher took a 230-page Tarantino draft and cut 60 pages, saying it “was essentially two movies.” He has also pointed to Hal Ashby’s 1975 Shampoo as a touchstone six weeks into filming. Tarantino, for his part, has said directing it himself would have meant walking “the same ground I’ve already walked” on what he still intends as his tenth and final film, a decision that left him telling Empire he felt he was “letting down” Brad Pitt by handing off the chair.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJH-wfSXnWg
The release plan is the smaller story wrapped inside the bigger one. This is Netflix’s first exclusive IMAX run, and it lasts exactly two weeks, from Nov. 25 through the Dec. 23 streaming date confirmed by Netflix. Regal and Cinemark declined to book their IMAX screens at all, about 100 houses and 20 respectively, pushing the release onto AMC’s 200 U.S. IMAX sites and roughly 500 screens worldwide. Cinemark CEO Sean Gamble called the arrangement “not aligned with the greatest interest of our theaters” on his earnings call, while IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond called it a “win-win” that some circuits were skipping “on ceremony.”
What this probably means: Netflix buys itself a red carpet, a limited IMAX gross and an awards-season title without committing to a real theatrical run, and the chains sitting it out get to remind the industry who still owns the big screens. (The same streamer’s own recommendation engine couldn’t agree with itself over what to watch tonight just days earlier, which says something about how it values precision.) That release-model fight is happening the same week DC Studios swapped out its own co-CEOs for a Marvel alum, another reminder that nobody’s chair is permanent right now. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood opened to $41.1 million domestic in 2019 on its way to $142.8 million domestic and $377.4 million worldwide on a $90 million budget. A two-week IMAX exclusive, even a sold-out one, does not produce a number like that, and nobody at Netflix is pretending otherwise.
Nov. 25 is the date that actually tests the strategy, when the film opens in the IMAX houses that bothered to book it. Tarantino’s novelization lands Dec. 8 from Harper, and the film itself streams Dec. 23, two weeks after the theaters go dark on it.
