Tarantino To Offer Two Different Cuts Of HATEFUL EIGHT

When Quentin Tarantino’s film, the western The Hateful Eight, comes out in December, audiences will get their option of seeing it not only in two different form but in two different lengths.

Speaking with Variety, Tarantino revealed that the 70mm roadshow presentation of Hateful Eight will be slightly longer than the standard version that will appear in multiplexes.

The roadshow version has an overture and an intermission, and it will be three hours, two minutes.The multiplex version is about six minutes shorter, not counting the intermission time, which is about 12 minutes.

As a cinephile, Tarantino is hoping to recreate the roadshow experience fro the late 1950s through the early 1970s, when large scale, epic films were released for limited engagements on 70mm prints. He explains that some of the changes are due to how people will see the non-70mm roadshow version of the film.

The 70 is the 70. You’ve paid the money. You’ve bought your ticket. So you’re there. I’ve got you. But I actually changed the cutting slightly for a couple of the multiplex scenes because it’s not that. Now it’s on Showtime Extreme. You’re watching it on TV and you just kind of want to watch a movie on your couch. Or you’re at Hot Dog on a Stick and you just want to catch a movie. It was awesome in the bigness of 70, but sitting on your couch, maybe it’s not so awesome. So I cut it up a little bit. It’s a little less precious about itself.

Tarantino and the Weinstein Company are hoping to get roadshow version of The Hateful Eight on as many as 100 screens before it releases the shorter version two weeks later. It is a significant jump in the number of screens over the last film to be released in the 70mm format – Christopher Nolan’s 2014 science fiction opus Interstellar, which had all of just 12 prints struck.

Tarantino has been one of the few holdout directors who has not yet made the switch over to digital filmmaking and doesn’t seem as if he is going to be trying out the new technology any time soon. He sees the 70mm release of The Hateful Eight as a way to remind people of the special-ness that used to surround going to the movies.

I didn’t realize what a lost cause 35mm projection was. But what I also didn’t know is how excited everyone was going to be about 70. I think everybody is looking to see how we do in that first two weeks. But that’s also kind of exciting. I’m hoping that ‘Hateful Eight’ does well enough that that becomes, for the filmmakers who care, the new premier way to launch their movie in an exclusive way.

While we have certainly seen other films in recent years that have approached and even surpassed the three hour running time length, the fact that Tarantino is presenting The Hateful Eight in such an old school manner certainly is exciting. While I have concerns that the Weinstein Company will be able to find 100 venues that are still able to screen a 70mm celluloid print, I have to give them kudos for even trying this type of release. I am reasonably sure that there isn’t a venue in my corner of Pennsylvania that is equipped to screen in 70mm, but I certainly don’t mind taking a two to three hour drive to a theater that is.