Why Quentin Tarantino briefly put his hatred of Netflix to one side: “That’s really intriguing”
According to most high-profile filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino, two inescapable evils are threatening to destroy cinema permanently: streaming and superheroes.
Most notably, Martin Scorsese has become the face of the old guard rebelling against the industry’s obsession with comic books. And yet, he’s happy to take his legendary talents away from the silver screen and toward on-demand, with streamers footing the bill for The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Christopher Nolan helmed three superhero movies, two of which became a pair of the 21st century’s most influential blockbusters, but he abhors the concept of films going straight to streaming so much that it irrevocably shattered his two-decade association with Warner Bros when the studio released its entire 2021 slate simultaneously on screens big and small.
Then there’s Tarantino, who seems to hold both in similarly low esteem. While he did toy with a couple of comic book adaptations, he never followed through, and these days, he’s a lot more likely to denigrate Marvel for what it’s done to the business than speak highly of the spandex-happy genre.
As for streaming? Well, he’s never been a big fan. The two-time Academy Award winner has trashed Netflix for making original films that don’t feel as though they even exist, savaged Ryan Reynolds specifically for doing so, and branded the evolution from perusing the aisles at the video store to endlessly scrolling through an algorithmically created user interface as borderline depressing.
And yet, Tarantino technically created a Netflix original when he re-edited The Hateful Eight into a miniseries. He’s been known for past comments to come back and tar him with a hypocritical bunch, so it’s probably not that surprising he ended up in bed with a company he’d so openly blasted on so many occasions.
His slow-burning western wasn’t a runaway hit at the box office, and nobody loves Tarantino’s work more than Tarantino, so when the powers-that-be approached him to gauge his interest in extending his eighth feature into an hours-long event, his curiosity was so piqued that he fully embraced his first, and so far only, detour into streaming.
“Netflix came to us and said, ‘Hey, look, if you’d be interested, if there’s even more footage, 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,” he explained to Slash Film.
“And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really intriguing,'” Tarantino admitted. “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.” In a way, it was an obvious route toward the filmmaker’s heart: if there’s one person who always wants to spend more time with a Quentin Tarantino film, it’s Quentin Tarantino.
Of course, David Fincher’s The Adventures of Cliff Booth is currently in production, but that’s not the same. Tarantino wrote the script and was paid handsomely for his troubles, but so far, he’s never discussed the quasi-sequel publicly, and he won’t have much, if anything, to do with it other than a script credit and possible ceremonial tag as a producer or executive producer.
He went back to the well with The Hateful Eight, though, which remains the one time he became actively hands-on as a director in a Netflix original.
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