Brad Pitt's 'The Adventures of Cliff Booth' From David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino Is Hitting IMAX This Thanksgiving
The ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ followup lands in theaters before streaming on Netflix.
Summary
- The Adventures of Cliff Booth, a sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, will get an exclusive two-week Imax run beginning November 25 before landing on Netflix on December 23
- David Fincher directs from a Tarantino-written script, with Brad Pitt returning as the aging stuntman alongside Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Peter Weller, and others
- The film is set in 1977 and takes the Thanksgiving Imax slot vacated by Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, which has been pushed to 2027
Seven years after Brad Pitt won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing him, Cliff Booth is back. This time, Quentin Tarantino has handed the keys to David Fincher. The Adventures of Cliff Booth is officially getting an exclusive two-week Imax run from November 25 before arriving on Netflix on December 23.
The casting of Fincher as director is the most interesting creative decision in this announcement, and it reframes what the sequel could be. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was Tarantino at his most languid and nostalgic, a film more interested in mood and atmosphere than mechanics. Fincher operates at the opposite end of that spectrum: precision where Tarantino sprawls, control where Tarantino drifts. Putting those two sensibilities into the same production — Tarantino’s writing, Fincher’s eye — produces a combination that is genuinely difficult to predict, which is not something that can often be said about a sequel this far into either director’s career.
The 1977 setting sharpens the intrigue further. The logline’s promise that it is “a very different Hollywood” from the one depicted in the original suggests the film will engage directly with the industry’s turbulence in the years following the Manson murders and the Polanski case, a period when the optimism of the New Hollywood was curdling into something harder and more cynical. Cliff Booth — aging stuntman, possible murderer, the most relaxed man in any room — is a compelling lens through which to watch that transition happen. The supporting cast around Pitt includes Elizabeth Debicki, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Scott Caan, and Peter Weller, which is not the lineup of a film treating its setting casually.
The film takes the Thanksgiving window from Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, which has been pushed to 2027, dropping one of the season’s most anticipated releases and replacing it with another. That Cliff Booth lands in the same conversation as a Gerwig Narnia speaks to where Netflix’s theatrical ambitions currently sit: the streamer is not filling slots, it is competing for the biggest moments on the calendar.The Adventures of Cliff Booth opens in Imax on November 25, with a two-week exclusive run before arriving on Netflix on December 23.
