The world is eagerly awaiting the arrival of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but it seems that Quentin Tarantino isn’t too happy about Disney’s relaunch of the Star Wars saga, with the filmmaker accusing the studio of forcing the ArcLight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood to drop his new film The Hateful Eight in favour of The Force Awakens.
“We were gonna play at the Cinerama Dome on the 25th. We were gonna open there and play there exclusively for two weeks,” Tarantino told Howard Stern. “And Star Wars was gonna play the two weeks before us. So the thing about it was, Disney, who owns Star Wars, decided ‘well, you know what? Maybe we wanna play throughout the entire holiday season.’ So we’re gonna go to the Cinerama Dome and say that they can’t honor their contract with us to show The Hateful Eight. And the Arclight people that own the Cinerama Dome, said ‘no no, you can’t do that. We have a deal with the Hateful Eight people, and showing it in 70mm. That’s what we do.’ We have the 70mm projectors. As of yesterday, Disney came to the Arclight people and said ‘no, you are going to play Star Wars in the Cinerama Dome for the entire holiday season, and if you don’t, if you honor your deal with the Hateful Eight, we will not allow you to have Star Wars, the biggest movie in the world, we will not allow you to show it at any of your Arclight movie theaters.'”
SEE ALSO: Listen to the opening track from Ennio Morricone’s The Hateful Eight score
“So they actually literally are engaging in extortionist practices against us,” he continues. “They’re coming out to destroy us, to grind us into the gravel. They’ve got the biggest movie in the world we’re talking about one effing theater. They are going out of their way to fuck me. As far as I’m concerned, and let all the entertainment reporters call up Disney as of now and ask for their comments about their extortionist practices. They didn’t need to be this vindictive. There’s a few movies coming out around the same time. There’s Sisters, there’s Joy, there’s a Mark Wahlberg-Will Ferrell movie [Daddy’s Home]. None of us are any serious competition to Star Wars.”
Via HitFix
The Hateful Eight opens in the States on Christmas Day and in the UK on January 8th.
Originally published December 16, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
