Stuntman and movie aficionado Rick Dalton and his TV star buddy Cliff Booth may be getting back together.
A follow-up to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is being assembled, with David Fincher, not Tarantino, in the director’s chair. It also has Brad Pitt and possibly Leonardo DiCaprio circling to reprise their popular and award-winning roles.
Tarantino wrote the script for the feature project, which is set up at Netflix and which could go before cameras by late summer, according to one source.
And while it is April 1, this news is not an April Fool’s joke. It is also ostensibly not a sequel to Once Upon a Time but a “derivative” that takes inspiration from it. The Playlist first reported on the film.
The mystery project is also not The Movie Critic, according to one insider. That was the title to the feature being developed by Tarantino to serve as his 10th and, ostensibly, his final film.
For unknown reasons, Tarantino shelved The Movie Critic, which was set in the 1970s, with the story said to focus on a movie reviewer for a pornographic magazine. It would have also featured Pitt returning as Booth, the easygoing stuntman and driver to beleaguered star Dalton.
According to one source, Pitt was taken by certain aspects of script, which never seemed to stop evolving, as well as his character’s part in it. He asked the filmmaker whether he would consider letting someone else direct the untitled project. Tarantino replied, and we paraphrase here, “Depends on who.” An indeterminate time later, Pitt returned with Fincher in tow. The two have a long-standing and fire-tested bond, having made Se7en, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and were at one point developing a sequel to World War Z. Tarantino gave his blessing, the project was repackaged and scooped by Netflix, where Fincher has an exclusive movie deal.
Sony financed and released Once Upon a Time in 2019. Tarantino has a unique deal in which he has an ownership stake in the movie, which increases every year for 20 years, when the movie reverts to him. One aspect unique to the deal is that the filmmaker owns the characters in that movie (and owns characters in other movies as well) while Sony currently retains Once Upon a Time. An insider noted that was the reason the Fincher project is not considered a sequel or prequel other than it uses Booth (and who knows who else?) as a character.
Also unclear is DiCaprio’s involvement. The actor remains in talks to star in an Evel Knievel movie for Paramount that is to shoot this summer, and is also said to be mulling a Martin Scorsese project. It is also unknown how big his role is in the script.
