Netflix formally revealed The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth as the movie's title on August 27. Earlier versions of the project had circulated under simpler variations of The Adventures of Cliff Booth.
Brad Pitt is back in the role that earned him the supporting-actor Oscar for Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. The official Netflix description offers only a deliberately spare setup: it is 1977, and Hollywood is a very different place.
Fincher is entering somebody else's version of Los Angeles
That may be the movie's most interesting creative complication.
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood was inseparable from Tarantino's reconstruction of 1969 Los Angeles. Streets, restaurants, radio broadcasts, movie marquees and cars were not background decoration; the city was part of the movie's fantasy.
The new film takes that character and fictional Hollywood forward eight years while handing the visual interpretation to a filmmaker with very different instincts.
Trade reporting has described Booth as working as a Hollywood studio fixer by this point. Netflix's current official synopsis does not elaborate on that occupation, so the precise jobs putting Cliff in motion remain largely unrevealed.
Tarantino wrote it. Fincher gets final control of the frame
Quentin Tarantino wrote the screenplay but is not directing. Fincher instead reunites with Pitt after Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Their last feature together arrived in 2008.
Fincher is bringing a familiar technical group with him. Erik Messerschmidt is director of photography, Donald Graham Burt handles production design and Kirk Baxter edits. Trish Summerville is costume designer and Ren Klyce is sound designer.
Those names make the 1977 setting more than trivia. The production is revisiting a world already obsessively designed in another director's style, then advancing it into a decade when the American movie industry itself was changing rapidly.
Netflix has assembled a cast without explaining who most of them are
Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Peter Weller are all officially confirmed.
The cast list also includes Matt Groove, JB Tadena, Corey Fogelmanis and Karren Karagulian. Karagulian previously appeared in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood as director Sam Wanamaker.
Netflix has yet to attach detailed character descriptions to most of those names. Nor has its current announcement explained whether Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton has any direct presence in the new story.
The first release is not Netflix
The movie begins an exclusive global IMAX run on November 25. Netflix says that run will last two weeks.
Streaming follows on December 23.
That order matters for a company whose theatrical strategies can range from awards-qualifying engagements to much broader event releases. Netflix is explicitly making premium theaters the first public window for one of its biggest auteur projects of the year.
Fincher's recent Netflix features Mank and The Killer also received theatrical exposure, but The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is being promoted around a defined worldwide IMAX-exclusive period months ahead of release.
This is a sequel with somebody else's fingerprints on the camera
Tarantino has written movies directed by other filmmakers before. True Romance is the obvious example. Cliff Booth is different because audiences have already seen Tarantino direct this specific character inside this specific alternate Hollywood.
Pitt's physical performance was part of that original construction: the relaxed driving, the stuntman's economy of movement, the long stretches where Cliff seemed to be doing almost nothing until violence arrived.
Fincher inherits all of that without being obliged to imitate it.
Netflix is still keeping the actual plot remarkably quiet. For now, the firm facts are more revealing about the production than the story: Tarantino's screenplay, Fincher's direction, Pitt back as Cliff, 1977 Los Angeles and an IMAX launch on November 25 before Netflix on December 23.
