An extended, mini-series version of the film has been released on Netflix
Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film, The Hateful Eight, is now a four-episode mini-series on Netflix. Even better, it contains 25 minutes of additional footage that wasn’t included in the cinematic release.
Fans of Tarantino’s western-themed, parlour-room whodunnit, which stars Samuel L.Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen, may remember that the film was already divided into six distinct chapters, so it seems strange that the ultraviolent auteur would then further split the film into quarters.
Speaking to Slashfilm, the director explained his decision to adapt the movie for the streaming platform:
“Netflix came to us and said, ‘Hey, look, if you’d be interested–if there’s even more footage, [and] if you’d be interested in putting it together in a way that we could show it as three or four episodes, depending on how much extra footage you have, we’d be willing to do that.'”
“And I thought, wow, that’s really intriguing. I mean, the movie exists as a movie, but if I were to use all the footage we shot, and see if I could put it together in episode form, I was game to give that a shot.”
As a result, this new extended version contains around 25 minutes worth of extra footage and also means certain scenes in the film don’t play out quite the same way as the cinematic version. For instance, according to The Verge, one key sequence is now shown from the perspective of a completely different character.
Discussing the differences with the new extended edition version of Hateful Eight, the director also stated that the miniseries just has a different feel to the original. Tarantino explained:Â
“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. It has a different feeling that I actually really like a lot. And there was [already] a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this ‘chapters unfolding’ quality.”
