Cliff Booth Returns In Fincher-Directed Tarantino Sequel Trailer
Brad Pitt is back in the role that won him an Oscar, now set in 1977 — but the director's chair changed hands. Tarantino wrote The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth; David Fincher shot it. IMAX gets it November 25, Netflix on December 23, and the new trailer spends its best beat explaining where Rick Dalton went.
The loosest character Tarantino ever wrote, in the tightest frame in Hollywood.
The new trailer for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth does something no trailer for a sequel usually does: it explains an absence. [Cliff Booth is back in new 'Further Mis-Adventures' trailer]
Brad Pitt returns as Cliff Booth in 1977, eight years after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in a sequel Quentin Tarantino wrote and David Fincher directed. It opens in IMAX theaters November 25 and reaches Netflix December 23. [Cliff Booth is back in new 'Further Mis-Adventures' trailer]
Start with the handoff, because the handoff is the film. Booth — the stuntman, the fixer, the sun-bleached calm at the center of Tarantino's 1969 — won Pitt the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Tarantino doesn't direct sequels to his own pictures, so the script went to Fincher: the most exacting framer alive, handed the loosest character Tarantino ever wrote. The ensemble around Pitt — Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Peter Weller — is built like a 1970s character-actor wall, and the trailer's confession is structural: Rick Dalton, the actor Booth doubled for, isn't in this one, and the footage takes a beat to say why. Booth in 1977 is a man whose job disappeared — the industry that needed stuntmen to absorb its risks has started absorbing them differently. [Cliff Booth is back in new 'Further Mis-Adventures' trailer]
The release shape tells its own story. A Netflix film opens in IMAX on November 25 and doesn't reach the platform until December 23 — nearly a month in which the only way to see it is the biggest screen in town. Theatrical is the campaign; streaming is the business. For a sequel to a film that was itself an elegy for theatrical Hollywood, the irony is either the point or the product, and with this creative team it's probably both. [Cliff Booth is back in new 'Further Mis-Adventures' trailer]
The risk was never Pitt — Booth's drawl and stillness are fully present in the footage. The risk is temperature: Tarantino shoots warm and loose, Fincher shoots cold and exact, and Booth only works warm. On the trailer's evidence, the looseness survived the handoff — the scenes breathe, the jokes land at walking pace, and Pitt looks like a man enjoying the one role he never has to push. Verdict on the experiment arrives November 25 in IMAX, and for everyone else, two days before Christmas. [Cliff Booth is back in new 'Further Mis-Adventures' trailer]
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