Cliff Booth left Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as the most companionable killer in Quentin Tarantino‘s filmography: Brad Pitt‘s unhurried stuntman, the one the sequel’s own logline now calls “a hippie-slaying stuntman” that Los Angeles no longer needs. On screen he was easy company. On the page, in Tarantino’s novelization of the film, he was something colder.

The first footage from The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, which Tarantino rolled without warning for a festival crowd in Hollywood, suggests the page has won. IndieWire, which was in the room, describes a Booth closer to the “cold-blooded, almost sociopathic” figure of the book than to the amiable man of the film. And the character Tarantino invented now moves on under another director’s camera: David Fincher‘s.

Tarantino turned a Q&A into Cliff Booth’s first public screening

The occasion was a screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at the TCL Chinese Theatre for AFI Fest. At the end of the post-film conversation, moderator Jacqueline Coley of Rotten Tomatoes asked about the new film. “Well, I could talk a little bit about The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, or I could show you the first 17 minutes,” Tarantino answered, as Variety and Deadline both report. Fincher was in attendance. What’s on Netflix says Tarantino asked the room to put its phones away, and the footage is not going online.

Deadline calls it the first public look at the film. Until now there had been a Super Bowl spot and a trailer, per Gold Derby. The sequel is set in 1977, eight years after the 1969 of the original.

Cliff Booth now runs the projector in Tarantino’s own cinema

Booth is no longer a stuntman. According to IndieWire and Gold Derby, the film opens in June 1977 with Cliff working as a projectionist at the New Beverly Cinema, the Los Angeles movie house that Tarantino owns in real life. IndieWire reports the in-joke drew a big laugh. The screen in that scene shows Soul Brothers Die Hard, a fictional blaxploitation picture starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; in TheWrap’s account, relayed by What’s on Netflix, Cliff recites its lines along with the film from the booth.

For a director who has always built his films out of other films, the image is exact. Tarantino has put his favourite creation behind the projector of his own theatre, a man who knows the dialogue of a B-movie by heart, and then handed him a second line of work. The Hollywood Reporter describes Booth “handling some more unsavory business on the side.” The official logline is plainer: when he is not bartending or projecting, “Cliff Booth is a fixer.”

The reports add a father, a pawn-shop owner played by Peter Weller, whom Cliff phones after dedicating a song to him on an AM station. IndieWire reads the opening as Tarantino back at his crime-fiction roots, in the line of Elmore Leonard, whom he adapted for Jackie Brown, and Raymond Chandler. A Los Angeles fixer who works in a cinema is Chandler’s city seen from the projection booth. Variety found the Hollywood of 1977 “gritty and dark,” in true Fincher style.

A paperback hero Tarantino would rather write than direct

Tarantino’s own explanation for bringing Cliff back is literary. “I loved the Cliff Booth character, I loved the way that Brad played him, and there was this aspect of him as sort of like a paperback hero,” he told the crowd. “I could see like a series of paperbacks with Cliff Booth getting involved with this adventure or that adventure.” Then, per The Hollywood Reporter: “As time went on, I just thought about coming up with a different adventure, getting him into a misadventure.”

The same report frames why he did not direct it. “As I’m getting older, being a man of letters is more my thing,” Tarantino said, “so screenplays and books and plays, everything except poetry.” He has kept writing the mythology since 2019: “The audience doesn’t need to know everything, but it’s kind of nice that I know everything.” What’s on Netflix adds that he dressed the set of Cliff’s trailer himself because the art department “doesn’t know Cliff Booth the way I do.”

Fincher did not take the script as delivered. Fincher told Empire, as quoted by Deadline, that the first draft he read ran 230 pages and that he cut 60 of them: “It was essentially two movies.” An auteur known for owning every frame has now given away the frames and kept the character, which is exactly how a paperback series works: one author, many covers.

When The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth comes out

Netflix opens the film in theatres, including Imax, on November 25, 2026, and on the streaming service from December 23, 2026. Alongside Pitt, the cast includes Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Peter Weller, Karren Karagulian and Corey Fogelmanis.

One detail from the opening scene, as TheWrap tells it, does the rest of the work. Two men Cliff waves in from outside the New Beverly sell him a haul of stolen goods, among them an Academy Award for Best Director, the one prize that neither the man who wrote the scene nor the man who directed it has ever won, after three nominations apiece. In the script, Cliff Booth buys his before either of them.

Tags: David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt, film sequels, The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth