Fincher/Pitt’s ‘Cliff Booth’ Plans Six-Month Shoot, Hundreds of Actors, Pricey Budget

Quietly slipped into the California Film Commission’s Monday press release was a detail that should make film obsessives perk up: an untitled Netflix feature was awarded a staggering $20M in film-tax credits — the single largest chunk dished out by the state for a production.

The film in question, according to Deadline’s sources is none other than “The Adventures of Cliff Booth,” David Fincher’s Brad Pitt–starring spiritual sequel to “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

While Netflix has still not confirmed the project, the film is understood to be operating under a veil of secrecy. What we do know: the film is scripted by Quentin Tarantino, who’s once again playing in the sandbox of his revisionist 1969 ‘Hollywood’ fantasy. It picks up where ‘Once Upon a Time’ left off, following Pitt’s enigmatic stuntman into new, presumably blood-stained terrain.

The film is reportedly planning a very ambitious shoot. The current schedule has production due to start on July 28, 2025 and leaking all the way to January 16, 2026. That’s a whopping six months of production.

Additionally, Deadline‘s sources have 128 actors, 428 crewmembers, and nearly 4,000 background-actor workdays tapped for the project. The qualified in-state spend is projected at $106M — a hefty portion of a still-undisclosed overall budget.

Rounding out the cast are Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Elizabeth Debicki, and Scott Caan — an eclectic mix suggesting Fincher’s vision for this project may not be your typical Tarantino knockoff. In fact, the production details scream epic.

With Tarantino having repeatedly signaled that his tenth film will be his last — and with The Movie Critic reportedly shelved — this Booth-centric follow-up might serve as a kind of spiritual epilogue to his entire filmography.

Tarantino’s 2019 film, which dripped with sun-drenched nostalgia, was Tarantino’s love letter to a bygone era. Whether Fincher aims to continue that tone or twist it into something darker remains to be seen. I’d bet on the latter.