Cliff Booth: Brad Pitt Returns With David Fincher at the Wheel
If you thought the best part of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was the guy grilling dog food and casually kicking Bruce Lee off a trailer, you are not alone — and now he's getting his own movie. The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Tarantino and starring Brad Pitt, is set for a two-week IMAX run starting November 25, 2026, before landing on Netflix on December 23. The trailer dropped on September 21, and the full title was only confirmed on August 26, when Netflix's own listing finally settled months of rumors that had people calling it The Adventures of Cliff Booth. That timing is exactly why the film is everywhere right now: it's the first real look at what may be the most unlikely sequel of the decade — a follow-up to a Tarantino movie, written by Tarantino, but directed by somebody else.
To understand why that matters, you have to go back to the original. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood opened in 2019 and grossed roughly $378 million worldwide against a reported $90 million budget, per The Numbers and Box Office Mojo. It earned 10 Oscar nominations and won two — Best Production Design and, more notably, Best Supporting Actor for Pitt, the first acting Academy Award of his career. Critics have it at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and 84 on Metacritic, where it's classified as "universal acclaim." Tarantino then went further than the movie: his 2021 novelization of the film quietly resolved the biggest mystery around Cliff — the rumor that he killed his wife — and, as CrimeReads documented, confirmed that yes, he did. A second Tarantino novel, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, is due from HarperCollins on December 8, 2026, just two weeks before the Netflix premiere, and it's set in the same 1977 Los Angeles as the film. Book and movie are companions, not adaptations of each other.
The concrete factors behind the current wave of attention are easy to pin down. Beyond the trailer, the official synopsis finally laid out the premise: it's 1969 plus eight years, Cliff has retired from doubling Rick Dalton — the trailer has him explaining he stopped because Rick "got too fat" — and now works as a Hollywood studio fixer, tangled up in murder, blackmail, theft and extortion. Variety has confirmed Leonardo DiCaprio is not returning as Rick, so this is Pitt's show alone. The cast around him is loaded: Elizabeth Debicki, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Timothy Olyphant (reprising his role as James Stacy), Carla Gugino, Scott Caan, Holt McCallany and Peter Weller, among others. There's also a behind-the-scenes wrinkle worth knowing: The Playlist reported in August that principal photography had wrapped but several days of reshoots with Pitt were scheduled, which is why the film skipped the fall festival circuit entirely. No delay to the release dates has been announced since.
The people making it are half the story. Fincher's last two features — Mank (2020) and The Killer (2023) — were both Netflix films, part of an exclusive deal he signed with the streamer in 2020. Deadline reported in September 2026 that Fincher has decided not to renew that deal when it expires in 2027, which makes Cliff Booth effectively a closing chapter of one of the most productive studio relationships of the streaming era. On Pitt's side, the film arrives after F1 put him back in the summer-movie conversation in 2025, and Tarantino has publicly said the project carries a reported $200 million budget — a figure he shared himself — because the script was, in his words, too gigantic and unwieldy to be a conventional theatrical release. A Tarantino story too big for Tarantino to direct, handed to one of the most meticulous filmmakers alive, funded at blockbuster scale by a streaming service that also gave it IMAX screens.
That's the shape of it: a character who was never supposed to carry a movie, now anchoring a $200 million crime story set in a fictional 1977, written by the director who invented him, directed by the man who may be saying goodbye to his streaming home, and released in the same month as the novel that expands his legend. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was a love letter to a version of Los Angeles that never existed. The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is what happens when you let one of its residents stick around eight years longer than the story needed him. December 23 can't come fast enough.
