A chill was felt on the strange, slightly obsessive corner of social media known as film Twitter. First a breeze, then a blizzard’s howl. Netflix had taken Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight and done something to it. It was now a TV show? With episodes? No, wait! It’s a new version with over 40 minutes of new material? Heads exploded like Channing Tatum’s at the end of the gruesome (but strangely hilarious) post-civil war western. What is going on?
A quick glance on Netflix shows that The Hateful Eight: Extended Version’s “season one” is four chapters at a respective running time of 50, 51, 53 and 56 minutes. The version that was already on Netflix (and the one that still shows up first when you do a search, at least on my Roku) is 167 minutes. Even a period-appropriate abacus will show you that there is a differential here of 43. So the answer to both questions of “is it changed?” and “is it longer?” is an annoying “yes, technically, but not really”.
Let’s walk through this in a slow and methodical way like Samuel L Jackson negotiating a carriage ride from Kurt Russell.
The Hateful Eight, perhaps the final substantial release from The Weinstein Company (its logo now the most hateful thing about the damn movie), had a unique rollout back in 2015. Anything to keep its in-house genius happy. As such, Quentin Tarantino shot the film in the rare Ultra Panavision 70 format. Perhaps you saw him on the press tour, boasting about cinematographer Robert Richardson finding old lenses that hadn’t been used since the 1966 Charlton Heston picture Khartoum. (Cool lenses, bad movie.)
To add to the 60s nostalgia vibe, and also to goose the movie’s mystique for marketing purposes, The Hateful Eight enjoyed what was called a “roadshow” release a week before the general one. Technically, this was not a real roadshow rollout, as it did not travel from town to town, but a sneak peek at 100 theaters that had the capacity to project 70mm film. Old projectors were sourced just for this event. Weinstein struck prints – actual physical prints of the sort that make film purists wobbly at the knees – and sent them hither and yon.
I had the good fortune to see it at New York City’s Village East cinema, a converted 1920s Yiddish theater in lower Manhattan. The Hateful Eight’s roadshow featured an overture of Ennio Morricone’s lush score and an entr’acte after the intermission.
The official running time for this version is 187 minutes, so a full 20 more than the mainstream theatrical lame-o digital cut. The shorter version was, until now, the only one available on home video or Netflix. This differential represents more than just the musical sections. Reddit scholars have put together that there are also a few moments that were present in the roadshow version. (Without a later release, it took some piecing together from the collective fanboy memory.)
Some of the differences are literally just alternate takes or camera angles for reasons we can only guess. But the longer cut does include a bit of business with Demián Bechir’s character plucking a chicken. It’s not vital, but part of The Hateful Eight’s appeal, as with so much of Tarantino’s writing, is the slow build to violence from seemingly unimportant minutiae. When the film does flashback to “earlier this morning” toward the end, there is an aha! moment when you discover why the chicken was only half-plucked. It’s a nice addition for those that were playing CSI: Wyoming.
OK, so lets grab that abacus again. Clearly there must be new material in here to get this up to 210 minutes, right? Well, no. By cutting this up into four “episodes”, it means opening and closing credits in each chapter, plus a short replay of the last scene in episodes two, three and four. Each is around four and a half minutes. That’s it, really. The new stuff that we thought we were getting, if for only a brief glorious film Twitter moment, is nothing but rerunning the credits.
On the one hand, they are cool credits! And it’s great to get more opportunities to listen to Morricone’s music; however, there is a dark, final punchline: Netflix automatically jumps away from closing credits and skips the opening unless you tell it not to. So these added minutes, if you want to experience them, don’t even occur naturally.
Let’s check that math. The credits come to about 27 minutes, which is more than the difference between the roadshow and theatrical releases. This doesn’t quite make sense, I know, but I swear there is nothing new here.
There is, however, a different vibe. For starters, the four episodes are a change from the original’s six delineated chapters. As such, the breaks come at new spots. The end of episode one doesn’t feel right – it just plays like the story ran out of gas. The other two breaks work well. It also means that the late-in-the-game introduction of the narrator happens at the same point in the story, but at a different point relative to a chapter break (or the intermission if you saw the roadshow.) We’d need to do blind side-by-side comparisons to measure the emotional impact of this alteration.
I can say, though, that despite Netflix’s presentation, this doesn’t feel like a typical binge-watch. Take Russian Doll, the success from earlier this year. I gobbled that up in one go because each chapter ended with an “oh my God, what will happen next?” The broken-up sections here do not have anywhere near the same impact. It plays like a movie where God came down to hit pause. Luckily, it’s a good and juicy movie, so you want to keep going. But the stopping-and-starting is probably the last thing you want to do to a movie where so much is dependent on a slow-burning vise-grip.
This so-called Extended Edition was the first time I had rewatched the movie since December 2015 and I found myself laughing at the comedy more than I remembered. (Jennifer Jason Leigh is particularly outstanding.) It’s a bleak and vicious picture reveling in extremes and, even though Jackson is the closest thing to a good guy, its repeated use of racial slurs is an understandable bridge too far for some viewers. (I’m hoping Tarantino gives this a rest in future films. Enough already.)
For those crying sacrilege, there is no way this is happening without Tarantino’s approval. Maybe it’s his salute to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Saga miniseries that aired on NBC. It’s certainly a good way to tap pop culture on the shoulder and say “remember me?” just a few weeks before the Cannes debut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Maybe this is to measure our expectations for the new one, to remind us that recent Tarantino movies, while never boring, have been deliberately paced and low on plot.
Either way, it’s amusing to think that a movie that began its life with the resurrection of old lenses and 70 mm projectors has achieved its final form as a “death of cinema” streaming platform miniseries. Tarantino does indeed have a sick sense of humor.
