Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” is returning to theaters in North America with 10 minutes of new footage as it readies its Oscar run this awards season.
The film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie will expand to over 1,000 locations in the U.S. and Canada starting on Oct. 25, and it will now include 10 new minutes of footage from four separate scenes previously not included in the original theatrical version. The new cut then should fall just short of three hours in running time, with the original running for two hours and 41 minutes.
The scenes will play both before the beginning of the film and after the ending of the film, bookending the original cut, so the original beginning and ending as Tarantino intended for the theatrical cut are still wholly intact.
“Audiences have shown tremendous support for this movie, and we look forward to offering them another opportunity to see the film as it’s meant to be seen – in theaters on the big screen – with more sights and sounds of the sixties from Quentin Tarantino as an added treat,” Adrian Smith, president of domestic distribution with Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, said in a statement.
It’s not surprising that Tarantino had additional material on the cutting room floor. Pitt previously said that Tarantino had toyed with the idea of re-cutting “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” as an episodic series, much in the way he recently did with his previous film “The Hateful Eight” for Netflix.
Domestically, “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” has roped in $139.8 million at the box office, bringing its total to $368.3 million worldwide. It’s Tarantino’s second-highest grossing film worldwide behind “Django Unchained.”
The film was meant to open in China the same weekend as this new re-release, but THR reported last week that the film would be blocked by Chinese regulators after the National Film Administration received a complaint from Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon Lee about the martial arts star’s depiction in the film. THR additionally reported that Tarantino had no intention of re-cutting the film to make it amenable to Chinese censors.