Audiences nationwide will get at an earlier look at the Quentin Tarantino western that started out as a sequel to Django Unchained.
Talk about starting the new year off with a bang: The Weinstein Company announced Friday that the wide release for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight will begin January 1 — one week earlier than originally scheduled.
According to the showbiz trade paper Variety, TWC still plans to open a special 70mm roadshow edition of the violent western drama on approximately 100 screens Christmas Day. But the new date for the nationwide rollout will enable moviegoers just about everywhere in North America to ring in 2016 with Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Dern, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins and the rest of gang assembled in Tarantino’s Golden Globe-nominated extravaganza.
And by the way: Did you know that The Hateful Eight started out as a sequel to Django Unchained? No kidding.
As Tarantino recently told online film commentator/interviewer David Poland:
“After doing Django I knew I didn’t want to do any Django movie sequels or anything, but I liked the idea of there being several paperbacks that could be the further adventures of Django or maybe go back in time, a couple more Django/Schultz adventures. So I hadn’t written a novel before and I thought I would just try my hand at writing a Django paperback. At the time it was called Django in White Hell. Instead of [Samuel L. Jackson’s] Major Warren it was Django.”
So what happened?
“Because I was introducing such rough characters in this piece, and there would be even more disreputable characters waiting for them [at Minnie's Haberdashery], at a certain point I realized, ‘Well you know what’s wrong with this piece? It’s Django. He needs to go. Because you shouldn’t have a moral center when it comes to these eight characters.’”
