Brad Pitt’s ‘Cliff Booth’ Hits IMAX Thanksgiving Weekend

Brad Pitt is heading back to the big screen — the very big screen. Netflix announced Wednesday that Cliff Booth, the sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, will open exclusively in IMAX theaters on Nov. 25, the day before Thanksgiving, for a two-week run before landing on Netflix on Dec. 23.

It’s a genuinely historic moment for the streamer: this will be the first Netflix film ever released in IMAX. And for director David Fincher, it marks his first movie in theaters since Gone Girl back in 2014.

Pitt returns to the role that won him his first Academy Award — Cliff Booth, the laconic, dangerous stuntman who spent the original film navigating the shadow of the Manson family alongside fading TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio). This time, the story jumps forward to 1977, with the logline teasing that it’s “a very different Hollywood.” Plot details beyond that have been kept extremely close to the chest — very on-brand for anything involving Tarantino, who wrote the screenplay before handing the director’s chair to Fincher.

The teaser Netflix dropped during the Super Bowl earlier this year was never released online afterward, which somehow only made people want it more. The one line of dialogue audiences got from Booth: “I don’t possess many talents, but I know better than to get in the way of a good story.”

A Dream Team Reuniting

This is the fourth time Fincher has directed Pitt, following Se7en, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — a track record that makes this one of the more reliably electric director-actor pairings in Hollywood history. Fincher has been deep in the Netflix ecosystem for years, from helping launch their original series strategy with House of Cards to steering the acclaimed FBI thriller Mindhunter. On the film side, his Mank arrived in 2020, followed by the Michael Fassbender assassin thriller The Killer in 2023. Cliff Booth will be his first Netflix feature to get a major theatrical release.

The ensemble around Pitt is stacked: Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Peter Weller, Matt Groove, JB Tadena, Corey Fogelmanis, and Karren Karagulian. Pitt and producer Ceán Chaffin are producing together, and Fincher’s longtime creative collaborators are all in place — cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (who won an Oscar for Mank), production designer Donald Graham Burt, editor Kirk Baxter, sound designer Ren Klyce, and costume designer Trish Summerville.

Stepping Into Narnia’s Spot

The Thanksgiving IMAX slot had originally belonged to Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, which recently moved to 2027. That film is now set for a traditional wide theatrical release in February with a full 49-day window before hitting the streamer — itself a significant shift for Netflix. The streamer has been careful to stress that neither move represents a broader change in strategy, though the pattern is hard to ignore: bigger titles are getting bigger theatrical moments.

The existence of a Cliff Booth sequel at all was enough of a surprise when it was first announced on April Fool’s Day 2025 — yes, really — that many people assumed it was a joke. It was not. The original Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was released by Sony in 2019, set in an alternate-history 1969 Los Angeles, and became one of Tarantino’s most beloved films. Pitt’s Cliff Booth — cool, quietly menacing, utterly unflappable — was a character audiences clearly weren’t done with.

Apparently neither was Tarantino. And now Fincher gets to take him somewhere new.

November 25 can’t come soon enough.