Is KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR Finally Getting A Release?

Quentin Tarantino’s two film opus Kill Bill was original conceived as one epic-length film before he split them into two separate volumes. But the writer/director has never fully abandoned the idea of the project as one larger whole, and shortly after Kill Bill Volume 2 premiered in theaters he screened a version of the films he titled Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which combined the two parts into one, at Cannes. Since then, the print has been screened a few select times, but a majority of Tarantino fans have not the opportunity to view the two films fused back into their original configuration.

While at San Diego Comic Con this past weekend (via Collider), Tarantino once again addressed the chances of The Whole Bloody Affair being made available to a wider audience and he stated that it could be coming to theaters within a year.

What’s going on with that is originally back when Kill Bill was going to be one movie, I wrote an even longer anime sequence. So you see in the movie [O-Ren] kill her boss but then there was that long hair guy… The big sequence was her fighting that guy. I.G. [The Japanese Anime Studio] who did Ghost in the Shell said we can’t do that and finish it in time for your thing. And [plus] you can’t have a thirty-minute piece in your movie. I said okay. It was my favorite part but it was the part you could drop. So we dropped it and then later when I.G. heard we were talking about doing Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair — they still had the script so without even being commissioned, they just did it and paid for it themselves. It’s really terrific. Anyway, The Weinstein Company and myself were talking about actually coming out with it sometime, not before the year is out, but within the next year with limited theatrical engagement as well.

Last summer, I had the chance to attend a rare screening of Tarantino’s personal print of The Whole Bloody Affair which he had assembled for screening at Cannes. As I noted in my review, the tonal difference between the two halves is really apparent, and somewhat jarring, when viewed consecutively. Also, Tarantino looses Volume 1’s gut-punch, cliffhanger line of dialogue – “Does she know her child is still alive?” – and that robs the second half of much of the dramatic tension that the line gives to Volume 2.