When I first heard Brad Pitt was returning as Cliff Booth in a 2026 release connected to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, my biggest question was about Quentin Tarantino. The filmmaker has spent years talking about stopping after 10 movies, so handing one of his characters and an entire script over to somebody else seemed pretty surprising. Apparently, the explanation involves Pitt, David Fincher and one extremely productive plane ride.
Speaking with Esquire, Pitt explained how The Adventures of Cliff Booth came back from the dead after Tarantino decided he did not want the project to become his final movie. He knew Tarantino had a finished script and started wondering whether his longtime collaborator Fincher might respond to it. He explained:
Quentin gave me his blessing. Finch and I were on a plane and I gave him the script, and by the time we landed he said, ‘I’m doing it.’
That is one heck of a way to get a movie made. Fincher and Pitt already have plenty of history together, having made Se7en, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. So the actor apparently had a pretty good idea of who might connect with Tarantino’s material once its original writer-director stepped away.
Tarantino has since explained why he was comfortable handing Cliff Booth over. He said directing another story set in the world of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood simply did not excite him enough to use as his final film. For that project, he wants to move into territory where he does not already know exactly what he is doing. He also gave some serious praise for his replacement, calling himself and Fincher the “two best directors” and saying the Zodiac helmer wanting to adapt his work showed how seriously the project was being treated.
Anyone worried that Tarantino reluctantly watched somebody else run off with Cliff Booth can probably relax. He wrote the screenplay, remains involved as a producer and personally gave the Oscar-winning actor permission to put it in Fincher’s hands.
Pitt also told the outlet he does not really view The Adventures of Cliff Booth as a sequel. He compared it to the episodic television Tarantino grew up watching, where the same character could wander into another adventure without requiring the previous story to continue directly.
That tracks with what we know so far about the Cliff Booth movie. Pitt is returning to the role that won him his Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but Fincher is behind the camera, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton is not the center of this story. It sounds like Cliff simply has another strange chapter waiting for him.
We will get to see if Tarantino made the right choice handing the reins over to his character and script soon enough. The Adventures of Cliff Booth begins an exclusive IMAX run Nov. 25 before arriving on streaming for everyone with a Netflix plan on Dec. 23.
