Quentin Tarantino sets an AFI Fest screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for October 23, back where it premiered
Seven years later, Tarantino returns his ninth film to the TCL Chinese Theatre — as the opening act for a sequel he wrote but handed to David Fincher and Netflix.
The American Film Institute announced it on October 13: Quentin Tarantino will screen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and sit for a conversation on Friday, October 23, at the TCL Chinese Theatre, as a special event of AFI Fest's 40th edition. The venue is the point — the Chinese Theatre is where the film held its U.S. premiere in July 2019, before grossing $409.4 million worldwide and collecting ten Oscar nominations, including Brad Pitt's supporting-actor win.
AFI president Bob Gazzale framed the evening as a prologue rather than a retrospective:
"AFI is proud to celebrate where it all began."
— Bob Gazzale, AFI President & CEO, in the announcement
"It all" refers to The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, the sequel in which Pitt reprises his stuntman — written by Tarantino, directed by David Fincher, and owned by Netflix. It debuts in IMAX theaters on November 25, over Thanksgiving weekend, before moving to the streamer.
The arrangement nobody predicted in 2019
Sit with the configuration for a second, because every part of it is surprising from the vantage of that 2019 premiere. Tarantino, cinema's loudest theatrical loyalist, wrote his first-ever franchise continuation and gave the directing job away — to Fincher, Netflix's house auteur — while saving his own tenth and reportedly final film for himself.
Netflix, in turn, is buying its Cliff Booth movie a real IMAX theatrical window, the kind it famously denies almost everything else. And the promotional runway for all of it is Tarantino himself, on stage at a 35mm-friendly Hollywood landmark, revisiting the 2019 original three days into a festival that opens with Wildwood and closes October 25.
The sequel Tarantino wrote belongs to Netflix. The original gets one more night at the Chinese Theatre first.
Tickets are on sale through AFI's site, and the Q&A is the main draw: it's Tarantino's first major public sit-down since the Cliff Booth campaign began, with an audience guaranteed to ask how it feels watching another director — any director — play with his characters. Whatever he answers on October 23 will be the quote of the festival.
Previously we wrote: I'd bet on Miami Vice '85 making $600 million — even though the last reboot tanked