Quentin Tarantino fan excitement is in overdrive with the news that his two Kill Bill films have been merged together and will be released as one giant film.
The presentation, titled Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, will essentially be a new Tarantino cinematic experience thanks to the inclusion of an exclusive animated sequence running for almost eight minutes.
It will also remove Vol 1’s cliffhanger ending, featuring assassins Bill (David Carradine) and Sofie Fatale (Julie Dreyfus), as well as the introduction to Vol 2, in which Uma Thurman’s protagonist recaps events of the previous film. The running time is four hours and seven minutes.
“I wrote and directed it as one movie – and I’m so glad to give the fans the chance to see it as one movie,” Tarantino said.
“The best way to see Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is at a movie theatre in Glorious 70mm or 35mm. Blood and guts on a big screen in all its glory!”
Lionsgate will distribute the four-hour film, which will be released in select cinemas on 5 December.
Upon a very rare screening of the cut at Cannes Film Festival back in 2006, IndieWire said it was the Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds director’s best film.
The debate of whether Kill Bill should be classified as one or two separate Tarantino films came to an end when Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was billed as his ninth film.
If Kill Bill had been counted as two films, Hollywood would have considered it his 10th release.
Tarantino himself previously acknowledged that those who think it’s two films are “technically correct” as each has opening and end credits, but he told ReelBlend: “But since I made it as one movie, and I wrote it as one movie, that’s just some chicanery that I did in editing.”
He said “it works really good” as two separate films, noting: “I don’t think it would’ve been as popular as a four-hour movie.”
Tarantino continued: “I literally had a guy say that to me. It was one of those diamond bullets. Every once in a while, somebody says something to you that, ‘OK, I can’t unhear that.’
“And he goes, ‘Look, Quentin, here’s the thing, man. My uncle Artie would love this movie. I mean, he would love it. He wouldn’t love it at four hours.’”
The martial arts action film, released months apart in 2003 and 2004, was led by Thurman as the Bride, a former assassin seeking revenge on her ex-lover and former colleagues who tried to kill her at her wedding rehearsal. It also starred Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah and Michael Madsen, who died in July of this year.
He recently said he saw Kill Bill as the “ultimate Quentin movie, like nobody else could’ve made it”, telling The Church of Tarantino podcast: “Every aspect about it is so particularly ripped, like with tentacles and bloody tissue, from my imagination and my id and my loves and my passion and my obsession. So I think Kill Bill is the movie I was born to make.”
