Bruce Lee's daughter hated that Once Upon a Time fight. The Cliff Booth trailer brings it back
Seven years after Shannon Lee called the portrayal of her father insulting, Tarantino's sequel opens its trailer with the story of "a stuntman who kicked Bruce Lee's ass."
The red-band trailer for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, released November 6, opens on a voiceover: have you heard the story about Bruce Lee getting his ass kicked by a stuntman? Cliff Booth's reply, trademark half-smile included: "It's been exaggerated a bit over the years."
That is not an apology. It's a wink — the sequel canonizing the most contested scene Quentin Tarantino ever shot and converting it into Cliff's legend. Of everything in a two-and-a-half-minute trailer about 1977 Hollywood's criminal underworld, the Bruce Lee beat is the one placed first, which is a marketing decision, not an accident of editing.
The fight that never ended
The history here is seven years deep and fully on the record:
- 2019: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood shows Cliff tossing Bruce Lee into a car door. Shannon Lee, Bruce's daughter, says Tarantino "can shut up" about defending the scene, calling the portrayal of her father an arrogant blowhard painful to watch.
- Also 2019: The film is pulled from Chinese release, reportedly after her complaint; Tarantino refuses to recut.
- 2021: Promoting his novelization — which expands Cliff's side of the fight — Tarantino tells critics of the scene to "suck a d--k" and insists Lee "was kind of an arrogant guy."
- 2026: The sequel's trailer leads with the legend.
So the pattern is set, and I'd call the next step inevitable: the family responds, coverage reframes the release around the controversy, and the cycle that buried half the conversation about the 2019 film starts again. Fans saw it coming within hours of the trailer:
"With the 'You the stuntman who kicked Bruce Lee's ass' line being thrown around so frequently, Lee's daughter and others are going to take even greater issue with this one than the last."
— a commenter on r/movies
What's at risk of being drowned out
The competition for attention is formidable: David Fincher directing a Tarantino script — two of the most exacting filmmakers alive sharing one movie for the first time — with Brad Pitt reprising his Oscar role, an exclusive two-week IMAX run from November 25, and a Netflix debut December 23. The trailer itself sells Cliff as a fixer pulled into a job by Elizabeth Debicki's talent agent, with Scott Caan's TV star explaining the appeal: this ain't about stunt work.
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A once-in-a-generation director pairing deserves to be the story. Instead, the first conversation out of the trailer is the same one from 2019 — "Tarantino's hate for Bruce Lee is legit bizarre," as one fan put it — because the film chose to reopen it in its own marketing. If Cliff Booth ends up remembered as round two of Tarantino versus the Lee family, nobody hijacked the narrative. The trailer volunteered it.
Previously we wrote: Johnny Depp's comeback is playing Scrooge — weeks after Patrick Stewart, the Scrooge of a generation, died