Some interesting news broke yesterday that David Fincher and Brad Pitt are teaming up for a sequel to Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, which is written by Quentin Tarantino. Basically, Tarantino wrote a sequel to Hollywood, but he doesn’t want to direct it himself—probably because he doesn’t want his 10th and final film to be a sequel—so Fincher is taking over and reteaming with Pitt after Se7en, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (one of these things is not like the other).
It’s unsurprising that Tarantino has more in the well when it comes to Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth. In 2021, he published a novel version of the story which is FOUR HUNDRED PAGES. The man CLEARLY has a lot of thoughts about Hollywood circa 1969. That said, Cliff Booth, Pitt’s Oscar-winning character, is not the one I am interested in. I am more into Rick Dalton, who is a sweaty mess and maybe got a career resurgence after helping to save Sharon Tate’s life. I’m WAY more curious about what happens to Rick than I am about what happens to wife murderer Cliff Booth. But Hollywood was very much Cliff’s odyssey through 1969 Los Angeles—to the extent that Cliff is the main character and Pitt campaigning as a supporting actor was category fraud—and Cliff is obviously the character QT has the biggest hard-on for in the film. That’s why Rick is a punchline and Cliff isn’t.
Anyway, the sequel film is coming from Netflix, with whom Tarantino has a somewhat hypocritical relationship. Tarantino is one of the big “support cinemas” guys, he even owns his own movie theater, the New Beverly in LA, that only shows movies on film. But he has no problem sending his side projects, like the miniseries version of The Hateful Eight, to Netflix. And now Netflix is distributing the Hollywood sequel, for which they’re ponying up a whopping $200 million. For comparison, Hollywood cost around $90-100 million, but then, Netflix doesn’t do back-end profit participation, because there is no back end on a streaming platform, so they have to pay everyone their full quote up front.
One good thing is that the film will shoot in Los Angeles this summer, which supports local crew and actors and contributes to the city’s rebuilding effort in the wake of the wildfires earlier this year. Every production that commits to filming in LA is a win right now, especially big productions like this, which employ hundreds of people for months at a time.
If they’re going to film this summer, we should be hearing some casting news soon. I’m curious to see if they bring anyone back from the first film, like Kurt Russell, Zoe Bell, Timothy Olyphant, or Julia Butters. Or will it be a totally new, post-Manson odyssey? Talk to anyone who lived in LA during the era of Manson, and they’ll tell you 1969 is when everything changed in the city, always implying for the worse. What will a Manson-free LA look like? Without that boogeyman, what could the city have been? I don’t think we need Cliff Booth to imagine that alternate history, but alas, we’re stuck with him.
