One of Netflix’s biggest movies of 2026 very nearly wasn’t a movie at all. In a new joint interview, David Fincher has revealed that one of the first big calls on The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth was whether Quentin Tarantino’s script should be a film or a series. Netflix has also released a new batch of images from the movie, which we’ve got for you below.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is the follow-up to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, with Brad Pitt back as stuntman-turned-fixer Cliff Booth. Tarantino wrote the script but handed directing duties to David Fincher, who works with Netflix under an overall deal (for a little while longer anyway, but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole).
Cliff Booth could’ve been a Netflix series
The big reveal comes from the new issue of Empire magazine, which features the first joint interview with Tarantino and Fincher about the movie. Empire has already shared online that Fincher trimmed the script heavily. “The first draft I read was 230 pages,” Fincher said. “It was essentially two movies.” Around 60 pages came out, bringing the movie in at roughly two hours and 20 minutes.
But it’s a line in the print interview of the magazine, out today, that caught our eye. Discussing how much of Tarantino’s script dealt with the fringes of these characters’ lives, Fincher told Empire: “There was a choice at the beginning: was it a movie or a series? In the end, it’s a long movie, but it’s the right kind of telling.”
Tarantino’s response to the runtime? “That’s a short movie for me!”
Frankly, we’re not surprised a series was on the table. Tarantino said on The Church of Tarantino podcast last year that he’d handed Fincher “a gigantic novel written in screenplay form” (our write-up here). He tells Empire much the same: “I take these giant novels I write and I adapt them into a movie every single solitary day of the shoot.” This time, he says, he and Fincher had to do that work before cameras rolled.
On top of that, The Playlist has previously reported that The Movie Critic, the abandoned Tarantino project this script grew out of, was originally conceived as an eight-part series.
The edit came in far tighter than even Tarantino expected. Fincher recalls that before the writer flew back to Tel Aviv, he was told: “Call me when you have it assembled. And, Dave, it’s gonna be four-and-a-half hours, don’t freak out.” When Fincher rang to say the assembly ran two hours and 18 minutes, Tarantino’s reaction was a stunned “WHAT?! What did you do?”
That said, Tarantino is adamant nothing is missing: “I don’t think there’s a scene that I wrote that’s not in the film.”
“Yeah, it’s compression,” Fincher agrees. “I think of myself as an interpreter. The number one person I want to make happy in any cinematic experience is the writer.” Editor Kirk Baxter, meanwhile, gets the best summary of the finished film in the whole piece, describing it to Fincher as “like Shampoo, but with a body count.”
Will we ever see a longer cut or an extended version on Netflix? Nobody involved has suggested it, so don’t hold your breath, but Netflix has been home (multiple times) to a special cut of Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, which was a multi-part series. For now, the 2h20 version is what’s coming.
The full interview is in Empire‘s Dune: Part Three issue, which is on sale now and well worth picking up.
What else have we learned about Cliff Booth?
Alongside the new images, Netflix has shared some fresh details on the plot and a few quotes from Tarantino and Fincher.
Speaking to Netflix, Tarantino recalled how the Fincher pairing came about in the first place:
Brad got in touch with me and said, ‘Hey, what about David Fincher directing the Cliff Booth movie?’ I was like, ‘That’s a fantastic idea.’ It was such a great idea that I couldn’t imagine it happening. It was just too cool.
Fincher told Netflix that part of the appeal was getting to push on with Cliff as a character and see where he’s ended up eight years later. He also offered up what might be the best one-line pitch for the movie so far:
It’s not really a stunt story, it’s not really a movie story, it’s not really even a Hollywood story anymore. It’s an LA story.
About six weeks into the shoot, Fincher says he kept coming back to Hal Ashby’s 1975 movie Shampoo as a reference point: a snapshot of a specific time and place in Los Angeles, populated by the strange characters you only find there. If you want a double bill before December, that’s your homework.
What’s the plot of The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth?
Here’s the expanded synopsis Netflix has shared:
It’s 1977, eight years after Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) ran into the Manson family in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Los Angeles doesn’t need a hippie-fighting stuntman anymore, so Cliff pays the bills bartending and working as a projectionist. On the side, he’s a fixer, solving problems for Hollywood’s rich and famous (and sometimes the not-so-good), occasionally outside the law.
Things kick off when talent agent Karen Crosby (Elizabeth Debicki) calls Cliff on behalf of her client, TV megastar Charlie Peters (Scott Caan), a man famous for doing his own stunts. Cliff is soon pulled into Charlie’s orbit, which includes:
- Toni (Carla Gugino), Charlie’s knowing wife
- Roderick “Hot Rod” Harrison (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a pro football champion turned screen star
- Eddie and Fernando Verdusco (Matt Groove and JB Tadena), gangster brothers causing mayhem across the city
Peter Weller rounds things out as Gus, Cliff’s dad, who lives in Marina del Rey. Fincher told Empire that was a deliberate choice: “There’s a perception that LA is all a red carpet, and that’s so not the case.”
New images from The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth
Now, onto the good stuff. Netflix has released a new batch of stills from the movie, giving us our best look yet at Debicki, Caan, Gugino, Abdul-Mateen II and Weller in character.
If you missed it, the first official trailer dropped last month after playing exclusively in theaters in front of Resident Evil.
As a reminder, the movie opens in IMAX theaters on November 25th, 2026 for an exclusive run, before streaming on Netflix from December 23rd, 2026. That’s just in time for Christmas.
The release follows a round of reshoots over the summer, when the title was also lengthened from The Adventures of Cliff Booth. That shorter title now belongs to Tarantino’s novelization, which HarperCollins is publishing on December 8th, 2026.
