The extended cut of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ is heading to Netflix
While many prefer the early works directed by Quentin Tarantino, he has also made some spectacular films in the latter half of his career. Among them, The Hateful Eight stands out as a fantastic hybrid-genre experiment that toys with the frameworks of westerns and thrillers in order to create a unique experience. In addition to the theatrical cut of the film, Tarantino also made an extended episodic version designed to work as a Netflix show.
While explaining the decision to make the TV cut, Tarantino told Slash Film: “So Netflix came to us and said, ‘Hey, look, if you’d be interested – if there’s even more footage, [and] if you’d be interested in putting it together in a way that we could show it as three or four episodes, depending on how much extra footage you have, we’d be willing to do that.'”
According to Tarantino, the decision to extend the original cut was interesting because it would utilise the extra footage they had shot for the film. He noted: “And I thought, wow, that’s really intriguing. I mean, the movie exists as a movie, but if I were to use all the footage we shot and see if I could put it together in episode form, I was game to give that a shot.”
The filmmaker continued: “So about a year after it’s released, maybe a little less, me and my editor, Fred Raskin, we got together, and then we worked real hard. We edited the film down into 50-minute bits, and we very easily got four episodes out of it. We didn’t re-edit the whole thing from scratch, but we did a whole lot of re-editing, and it plays differently. Some sequences are more similar than others compared to the film, but it has a different feeling. It has a different feeling that I actually really like a lot. And there was [already] a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this ‘chapters unfolding’ quality.”
Although the TV version was initially released on Netflix, it was removed from the streaming platform earlier this year. However, according to the latest reports, fans can rest easy knowing both the theatrical cut of The Hateful Eight and the extended episodic version are returning to Netflix on April 25th, 2023.
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