Quentin Tarantino to put off directing movies with another Cliff Booth novel

Tarantino's The Adventures Of Cliff Booth will mark the third Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood novel.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  September 15, 2026 | 4:13pm
(Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)
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Quentin Tarantino to put off directing movies with another Cliff Booth novel

Gearing up to do anything other than direct his prophesied 10th feature film, Quentin Tarantino has added yet another item to his laundry list of directing farce for the British stage, insulting Paul Dano on podcasts, and chilling with the IDF: Writing another Cliff Booth novel. Per Variety, Tarantino, amid the longest directorial dry spell of his career and ahead of the film’s Netflix premiere, will publish a sequel to his Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood novel entitled The Adventures Of Cliff Booth, a variation on the David Fincher film he opted not to helm, The Further Mis-Adventures Of Cliff Booth. Implying the book will feature Booth’s more successful and deliberate exploits, as opposed to the misfortune of the film, the novel is set in 1977, eight years after the end of Once Upon A Time. There’s no plot yet, but there is a logline: “The Swinging Sixties are long gone—but Clifford Booth keeps on keeping on…War hero, stuntman, bartender, cinema projectionist…with the occasional ‘clandestine services’ for his friends…” This is the third Once Upon A Time novel, following the fake film history book The Films Of Rick Dalton.

The previous Once Upon A Time novel elaborated on Booth’s life as a psychopathic cinephile and his distaste for that “fraud” Antonioni—Cliff’s words, not ours—which led many to believe that Tarantino’s nearly made final film, The Movie Critic, starring Brad Pitt, would follow the character as a film reviewer for a porno mag. Roughly a year after Tarantino pulled out of the film, saying he would be “walking down the same ground I’ve already walked,” Netflix acquired a script for a Once Upon A Time sequel starring Pitt, which David Fincher would direct. For his part, Tarantino said that Booth was never in The Movie Critic, but he did say that he gave Fincher “a gigantic novel written in screenplay form” of unused Booth misadventures. 

The book will be released on December 8, a few weeks before the film’s December 23 Netflix debut. The movie is also getting a brief IMAX-only theatrical run, starting on November 25, before inevitably disappearing into Netflix’s carousel, like the last two Fincher films. Meanwhile, in his effort to avoid ever directing a movie again, because Once Upon A Time really was the career capper Tarantino was looking for—just a shame it was only his ninth film, one short of his arbitrary rule of 10–the Oscar winner will direct a stage farce starring Sacha Baron Cohen, which Tarantino titled The Popinjay Cavalier, like he was Wes Anderson or something.

 
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