By now, you’ve probably seen dozens of headlines regarding Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, from the depressed and betrayed director “shelving” his anticipated Western to him completely “abandoning” the film, which kind of negates what he told Deadline’s Mike Fleming, Jr. The truth is that while it seems like the foot-loving filmmaker has taken his ball and gone home, he also left the door wide open for The Hateful Eight to at least be made into a book, if he doesn’t end up resuming the project later this year once he wraps another film.
In the meantime, all we can do is sit here, call the guy a big, old jerk and think about what could have been in a Western starring Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson. Fortunately, to help our thought process a little, The Wrap has a copy of the script and has revealed some new details.
The script is an ensemble Western with obvious parts for Madsen and Dern, as well as Tarantino stalwarts like Samuel L. Jackson and Christoph Waltz. Jackson and Madsen would likely both play bounty hunters returning human plunder to a town called Red Rock in exchange for hefty rewards. Their characters, a former major in the Union army and a man named John Ruth, dominate the first two of the script’s five chapters.
They run into a Southerner named Chris Mannix on the road, and three of them, along with their driver — a living prisoner and three dead bounties strapped to the roof — arrive at a haberdashery to take shelter from an oncoming blizzard. Yet the proprietors, Minnie, Sweet Dave and her other colleagues, are nowhere to be found. In their place are four men, a Southern general (likely Dern), an alleged hangman, a Frenchman named Bob and a cowboy named Joe Gage.
Mistrust, coffee and violence ensue.
We won’t say where it goes from there…
Well, what f*cking help are you?
While The Wrap didn’t reveal any of the other key details – seriously, thanks for not doing that – they did include an image of a section of the script that was presumably cut, because it has a giant X over it.