Quentin Taran­ti­no has re-cut The Hate­ful Eight into a Net­flix miniseries

Big week for Quentin Taran­ti­no, who con­firmed just this morn­ing that his lat­est fea­ture Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood would indeed make its world pre­mière at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val after sched­ul­ing uncer­tain­ty called that much into question.

But that’s not all – this week also saw the unveil­ing of a ​“new” ver­sion of his last pic­ture, The Hate­ful Eight, on stream­ing video plat­form Net­flix. The word ​“new” has been placed in scare quotes because the extent to which this cut builds on the the­atri­cal or slight­ly expand­ed Road­show cuts has already been the sub­ject of hot debate.

Taran­ti­no explained it all in a recent call with the folks at Slash­Film. Net­flix approached him with the idea of divid­ing the lengthy film up into more eas­i­ly digest­ed chunks, and the chal­lenge intrigued him:

“So about a year after it’s released, maybe a lit­tle less, me and my edi­tor, Fred Raskin, we got togeth­er and then we worked real hard. We edit­ed the film down into 50 minute bits, and we very eas­i­ly got four episodes out of it. We didn’t re-edit the whole thing from scratch, but we did a whole lot of re-edit­ing, and it plays dif­fer­ent­ly. Some sequences are more sim­i­lar than oth­ers com­pared to the film, but it has a dif­fer­ent feeling.”

While view­ers ini­tial­ly sur­mised that the Net­flix ver­sion didn’t con­tain any new footage (sub­tract the padding of the cred­its sequences, and the run time just about shakes out to that of the the­atri­cal cut), Taran­ti­no was eager to set the record straight. He claims that the Net­flix minis­eries con­tains ​“25 min­utes” of new footage.

But whether the footage con­tains 25 min­utes of new mate­r­i­al is an entire­ly dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tion. Taran­ti­no uses the exam­ple of the first scene in which John Ruth and Daisy Domer­gue enter Minnie’s Hab­er­dash­ery, unaware that they’ve got killers in their midst. He shows this scene from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, chang­ing its mean­ing and tone with­out real­ly offer­ing any­thing new.

Per­haps this effort gave Taran­ti­no some­thing to do while mulling over how to fin­ish Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood. At any rate, it’s only the lat­est broad­side from Net­flix against the divid­ing line between film and tele­vi­sion – next up, chop The Oth­er Side of the Wind into ten shorts!

The Hate­ful Eight is stream­ing now on Net­flix US as a series, and in its orig­i­nal for­mat on Net­flix UK.