Quentin Tarantino Accuses Disney of "Going Out Of Their Way To F—" Him with STAR WARS
Looks like just one Quentin Tarantino controversy isn't enough for this holiday season.
The writer/director of The Hateful Eight went on The Howard Stern Show to air his grievances with The Walt Disney Company, who he claims is "going out of their way to f*ck" him with Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It's not that Tarantino thinks his film stands any real chance at competing with the space epic at the box office, but that he claims Disney is screwing with his film's planned release strategy in order to keep The Force Awakens in a certain theater for a longer period of time.
We were gonna play at the Cinerama Dome on the 25th. We were gonna open there and play there exclusively for two weeks. And Star Wars was gonna play the two weeks before us. And I grew up in Los Angeles, so I think of the Cinerama Dome as a real big deal and imagine seeing it at the Cinerama Dome. 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 70[mm]. That’s what we do.' […] 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.'
Wow. That seems like a real dick move on Disney's part. Tarantino continued:
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 […] It’s vindictive, it’s mean, and it’s extortion. They literally threatened the Arclight. They didn’t need to be this vindictive. There’s a few movies coming out around the same time…none of us are any serious competition to Star Wars.
Stern put a call out to Disney CEO Bob Iger and to J.J. Abrams (whom Tarantino does not blame — he blames "the Disney people" making those decisions, not "the Star Wars people") to fix this, so we'll see if they end up taking back their threat. I mean, we're talking about one theater in Los Angeles. It definitely wouldn't make a huge difference in the long run with Star Wars' performance, especially since it has a full week to play there before Christmas Day anyway. This seems like a typical Hollywood power play, with some executive trying to establish dominance, but we'll see if by getting awareness out there, Tarantino is able to remedy the situation.
Via: ScreenCrush