Quentin Tarantino appeared on The Howard Stern Show this morning to promote his new film, The Hateful Eight. The two had a calm, relatively un-noteworthy chat that didn’t touch on anything controversial or include claims of extortion involving Disney and the producers of the new Star Wars movi-…
Wait, what’s that? Oh, I’m sorry. I appear to have gotten my facts wrong on this one. Turns out it did include all that stuff. I knew that didn’t sound right.
According to Tarantino, his film was supposed to play at Los Angeles’ famous Cinerama Dome beginning on December 24, but Disney applied pressure to the theater’s parent company, Arclight, and threatened to pull The Force Awakens from all Arclight theaters if it didn’t get the extended Cinerama Dome run through the holidays, which it now has. And Tarantino, as one might imagine, is none too pleased, telling Stern, among other things, “It was real bad news and it f*cking pissed me off,” “They are going out of their way to f*ck me,” and “It’s vindictive, it’s mean, and it’s extortion.” So, there’s that.
As Deadline points out, part of his frustration is tied to the general fight for holiday screen space, but a bigger part appears to be the significance of the Cinerama Dome venue itself:
Living here in L.A., The Cinerama Dome is a prized venue for Tarantino. In fact the Cinerama logo appears in the opening credits of The Hateful Eight. The premiere for the film was held on Monday, Dec. 7 at the Cinerama Dome and the director told Deadline’s Pete Hammond, “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.”
No word yet from Disney or Arclight about Tarantino’s claims, but one has to assume their eventual responses will include substantially less cussing, which is kind of a shame.
