The Cliff Booth sequel trailer for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth has landed, and it confirms what the first Super Bowl teaser only hinted at: this is a darker, grittier Los Angeles than the sun-dappled version Quentin Tarantino conjured in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Brad Pitt returns as Cliff Booth, this time directed by David Fincher, in a film heading to IMAX theatres worldwide on 25 November before arriving on Netflix on 23 December.
The new 90-second trailer recycles footage from the earlier teaser but layers in fresh detail, backed by a Netflix press release carrying a fuller plot synopsis. Glimpses of billboards for Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Black Sunday signal the late-1970s setting; the press release makes it plain: ‘What was once a fairytale is now a crime story.’ Fincher’s dramatic lighting provides a literal contrast to Tarantino’s warm 1969 California, and the stakes have shifted accordingly.
The Cliff Booth Sequel Trailer’s New Story
Cliff opens the trailer icing a wound with frozen peas in a walk-in freezer, a detail that suggests he still carries the damage from the Manson home invasion at the Dalton estate. He’s been washed out of the film industry and is jobbing on its margins: bartending at a dive with a mud pit, working as a projectionist at Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema. But a second life as ‘a fixer’ pulls him into Carter-era Hollywood’s smutty underworld, after Elizabeth Debicki’s talent agent Karen Crosby and Scott Caan’s television star Charlie Peters come knocking, apparently impressed by Cliff’s history of ‘alleged’ murder.
Caan, who looks strikingly like his father James, plays Peters as a man who knows what kind of help he needs. Debicki employs her native Australian accent as Crosby, and their scene with Booth has the texture of a classic noir’s first act: a job that sounds simple enough, offered to someone who knows it never will be. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II appears as Roderick ‘Hot Rod’ Harrison, whose backstory appears to be modelled after Jim Brown’s. Carla Gugino plays Peters’ wife Toni. Karren Karagulian, carrying a Schoolhouse Rock bookbag, apparently enlists Cliff to obtain a briefcase of cash. JB Tadena and Groove play the Verdusco Brothers, described in the press release as ‘mysterious gangsters causing mayhem across the city.’ Peter Weller appears stepping out of a car beneath an ad for the Normandie casino.
According to Wikipedia’s entry on the film, Kirk Baxter edited the picture, adding another trusted Fincher collaborator to the crew. Fincher has also brought director of photography Erik Messerschmidt with him, whose signature shadows are visible from the trailer’s first frame, alongside production designer Donald Burt Graham.
A Handoff Between Two Generations of Filmmakers
This is Pitt and Fincher’s fourth collaboration, but in one respect it is basically unprecedented: a handoff in which one director steps in to helm a sequel written by another. Tarantino reportedly sat next to Fincher on set for most of the shoot, a detail that prompted some to accuse Tarantino of finding a loophole in his self-imposed ten-film mandate. That reading, though, underestimates how thoroughly Fincher has stamped the project with his own team.
Tarantino’s involvement on the written side is not unusual for him. He rose through Hollywood first as a screenwriter, and it has been thirty years since he wrote a script he did not direct himself, with 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn the last example. More recently he published a novelisation of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2021 and a collection of film criticism, Cinema Speculation. HarperCollins will publish a follow-up novelisation, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, on 8 December. His next project as writer-director is a stage farce called ‘The Popinjay Cavalier’, a swashbuckling comedy set in 1830s Europe, premiering on the West End in London in 2027 with Sacha Baron Cohen set to star.
Timothy Olyphant is the only confirmed returning character from the first film besides Cliff himself. Olyphant revealed on Conan O’Brien’s podcast in August that he is reprising the role of Jim Stacy, a real actor who starred in the CBS Western series Lancer. In the trailer he is sporting his white-blond look and a suit; his slightly stiff walk may be a story point. In 1973, the real Stacy was struck by a drunk driver while riding his motorcycle with his girlfriend; she died, and Stacy lost an arm and a leg, though he continued acting into the early 1990s.
Barry Livingston, a child actor who appeared on My Three Sons from 1965 through 1972, is not in the trailer, but told the audience at a nostalgia-convention panel in September, according to Rewind Magazine, that he will be playing a ‘disco kingpin.’ Holt McCallany has been widely announced as a cast member but was still claiming as of last August that he is not in the film. As the trailer itself suggests, Netflix and IMAX will have the definitive answer when the film opens on 25 November.
