Tarantino Surprises AFI With 17 Minutes of Cliff Booth

Quentin Tarantino did not come to AFI Fest to reminisce. He came to hijack the night. After an IMAX screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and a Q&A at the TCL Chinese Theatre on October 23, Tarantino told a few hundred people to put their phones away — and then rolled the first 17 minutes of The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, the David Fincher sequel that nobody outside Netflix had seen a frame of. Netflix confirmed the surprise in a press release shortly afterwards, which tells you it was planned down to the second — and that it worked.

The footage itself is not going online, and nobody should hold their breath for a leak either. But TheWrap was in the room, and its rundown of the opening is enough to make the wait for November feel unreasonable.

What the 17 minutes actually showed

The film opens eight years after the first movie, in 1977, in a Hollywood that has moved on without Cliff. He has seemingly left stunt work behind. These days he earns money as a bartender and a projectionist, while also working as an unofficial Hollywood fixer — using what Netflix calls his "occasionally extralegal" talents to resolve problems for people in the industry.

The official synopsis puts it better than any review could: "Murder, blackmail, theft, extortion — just another summer in Hollywood." The trailer, released on September 21, had already shown Cliff moving through studio offices, cars, nighttime streets and jobs that turn violent without warning. The AFI footage, by every account in the room, leaned into that same world — agents, actors and behind-the-scenes people crossing Cliff's path, a racetrack, tense meetings, and gunfire that arrives before explanations do.

The cast around Brad Pitt is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the new material. Elizabeth Debicki plays talent agent Karen Crosby, who approaches Cliff on behalf of her client Charlie Peters, played by Scott Caan — a successful television actor known for performing his own stunts. Asked why he is no longer doubling for Rick Dalton, Cliff has an answer that got the biggest laugh of the night: "Rick got too fat for me to double him anymore." Carla Gugino plays Charlie's wife Toni, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays professional football champion-turned-actor Roderick "Hot Rod" Harrison, and Matt Groove and JB Tadena play the Verdusco brothers, described by Netflix as mysterious gangsters "causing mayhem across the city."

Why Fincher directing matters

Context matters here. The original film was written and directed by Tarantino in 2019, and it won Pitt an Academy Award for playing Cliff. This time Tarantino is credited as the screenwriter but opted not to direct, and David Fincher is behind the camera, with Pitt producing alongside Ceán Chaffin. That is not a small change. Fincher's precision against Tarantino's dialogue is the whole bet of this movie — a character built on laid-back confidence, dropped into rooms where everyone else is nervous.

The honest answer: a 17-minute surprise screening is the best marketing Netflix could buy, because footage nobody can record is footage everybody talks about. The film opens in IMAX on November 25, 2026 for a two-week exclusive run, then lands on Netflix on December 23, 2026. Tarantino is also publishing a companion novel, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, on December 8. A month from now, the conversation will not be about what was shown at AFI. It will be about whether the full film earns that opening.

My take: the riskiest thing about this sequel was never the story. It was whether anyone other than Tarantino could direct Cliff Booth without flattening him. Fincher, of all people, is the one director whose control freakery might actually suit a character who never loses his cool. November 25 will tell us.

Related: The Prestige IMAX Re-Release 2027 Teaser — another IMAX event worth marking on the calendar.