Fincher's 60-page cut is the best news Cliff Booth could get

Is there anything scarier for a Quentin Tarantino fan than a Tarantino script nobody dared to touch? Maybe that's the wrong fear. The news that David Fincher cut 60 pages from The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth sounds like a sacrilege to some. We think it's the most encouraging detail about the project so far.

Here is what we know. In a joint interview with Empire, Fincher said the first draft he read ran 230 pages and "was essentially two movies." He cut 60 pages, and the film now runs around 2 hours and 20 minutes. It opens in IMAX on November 25 and streams on Netflix from December 23.

A director who writes this much needs a reader, not a fan

Tarantino's voice is the whole appeal, and it is also the risk. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was, in his own words, a hangout movie, one that could afford to wander because the audience knew it was heading to Cielo Drive. That dread did the plotting for him. He says as much: "I didn't need a lot of plot."

This time he says the script is "very different," with the flavor of "an Elmore Leonard paperback." A crime story lives or dies on momentum. When a screenplay is long enough for two films, the question isn't whether it's good. It's which of the two films you're making. We think a director who loves the material but isn't emotionally invested in every digression is the ideal answer. Tarantino has said he opted against directing this one because he didn't want his intended final film to be a sequel, and, as The Hollywood Reporter notes, he said he was "still walking down the same ground I've already walked." That reluctance, ironically, may free the script from its author.

The "Venn diagram" line is the tell

Fincher's description of the process is revealing: "Somewhere in there was the Venn diagram of what Brad wanted to do, what I want to do, what Quentin wanted to do." That is not the language of a hired gun filming a sacred text. It sounds to us like three strong people negotiating, and the film is what survives the negotiation.

We would be careful here, though. Fincher's quote is promotional, and we haven't seen the film. A cut can also remove the strange, specific scenes that make Tarantino worth watching. The page count isn't perfectly uniform in coverage either: most outlets say 60 pages, but at least one headline says 40, so treat "60" as Fincher's own figure rather than a measured one. And those pages are not necessarily lost: Tarantino's full story will be published as a novel in December, according to IGN. That's a smart pressure valve. The film can be lean while the excess lives on the page.

Why this could beat fan service

The easy version of this project writes itself: Brad Pitt back as Cliff, a nostalgic 1977 Los Angeles, a few winks at the first film. Netflix's own pitch hints at something harder. As Deadline describes it, "what was once a fairytale is now a crime story," with Cliff working as a fixer for Hollywood's great and not-so-good, and a cast including Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

The stakes are real, too. The first film made $377 million worldwide and won two Oscars, according to The Hollywood Reporter. A sequel-of-sorts can coast on that goodwill. A trimmed, momentum-driven crime picture directed by Fincher, in our view, cannot coast, and that is the point in its favor.

Our verdict

Don't read the 60 pages as a loss. Read them as evidence that someone in the room was willing to say no to the material, and that the film is better for it. That is rarer than it sounds, and it is the best argument that this will be a film rather than a reunion. Our advice: if you can, see it in IMAX, since Netflix is giving it a two-week theatrical run, and judge the cut by the rhythm of the story, not by the scenes you imagine are missing. We could be wrong, and 140 minutes is still long. But we would rather bet on the version with an editor.