Following a surprise screening at AFI Fest on Friday, Sony Pictures has reportedly committed an eight-figure P&A spend to release the first 17 minutes of Quentin Tarantino’s 'The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth' in IMAX theaters worldwide.
Following a surprise screening at AFI Fest on Friday, Sony Pictures has reportedly committed an eight-figure P&A spend to release the first 17 minutes of Quentin Tarantino’s 'The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth' in IMAX theaters worldwide.
The studio aggressively outmaneuvered rival first-look bids from Netflix and Apple to secure global distribution rights for the footage. The highly coveted package consists entirely of Brad Pitt driving a powder-blue Karmann Ghia down Hollywood Boulevard, smoking a cigarette, and occasionally tapping his steering wheel to a vintage KHJ radio broadcast. Early tracking currently has the quarter-hour sequence opening to a robust $45 million domestically, driven heavily by male quadrants aged 25 to 54 who view the unbothered, historically adjacent wife-murderer as an aspirational lifestyle brand.
It is a massive IP play for the lot, and our internal test scores on Brad staring silently through a windshield for a third of an hour are absolutely through the roof.
The unprecedented rollout is expected to dominate the upcoming awards season, with the studio already purchasing front-page wraparounds in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter for a massive For Your Consideration campaign. Sources close to the production indicate Tarantino originally shot the 17 minutes on pristine 70mm stock over an arduous nine-month principal photography period, ballooning the short's budget well past the 100 million dollar mark. The production reportedly locked down six blocks of Hollywood Boulevard for three consecutive weeks just to ensure the background extras were wearing historically accurate denim flares while Pitt idled at a red light.
At press time, Tarantino had reportedly halted the final IMAX mastering process after realizing he forgot to include a tight, lingering close-up of a woman’s bare, dirty feet resting on the dashboard.