“They are going out of their way to fuck me,” said Quentin Tarantino, one of the seemingly few people on planet Earth not all too thrilled with Disney and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The filmmaker, who’s getting ready to release a 70mm “road show” of The Hateful Eight on Christmas Day, put the Mouse House on blast during an interview with Howard Stern for dominating the cinema space with Star Wars.
The Cinerama Dome theater is a famed spot in L.A. It’s important for Tarantino; the Cinerama logo even appears in the opening credits of The Hateful Eight. Few spots are available to house a 70mm screening of this work, and, according to the director, the Dome was one of the locations originally slated to premiere his eighth work starting on December 25th. Now, The Hateful Eight is getting pushed out, due to a push by Arclight Cinemas and Disney to give The Force Awakens an extended run through the holidays.
“It was real bad news and it fucking pissed me off," Tarantino told Stern on his Sirius radio show. He later explained, “I made The Hateful Eight for the Dome…This is the first time seeing it at the Dome for me too, and it was like I hadn’t even seen it before, not like this.” Tarantino called the action “vindictive,” “mean,” and “extortion,” though he clarified his beef lies with the top suits behind Disney and not Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams.
The Hateful Eight isn’t the only film opening this month that’s suffering from Star Wars fever. Earlier this year, it was announced that Star Wars had dibs on all IMAX screenings for four weeks beginning with its opening on December 18th. That meant that films hoping to capitalize on the big-screen format, like The Revenant and In the Heart of the Sea, would get knocked out of those spaces during this period. This also means that films opening in the early days of January are affected. Needless to say, anticipation for Star Wars is unbearably high. Perhaps, while all of us are foaming at the mouth to see it, we’ll be too distracted to realize the true implications.
Listen to Tarantino’s chat with Stern below.
