• Netflix’s Cliff Booth will play exclusively in IMAX theaters for two weeks starting Nov. 25, before streaming Dec. 23
• Brad Pitt returns to his Oscar-winning role as the stuntman from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, now set in 1977
• David Fincher directs from a Quentin Tarantino screenplay — their fourth film together
• The film takes the Thanksgiving slot vacated by Greta Gerwig’s delayed Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew
• This marks the first Netflix film ever to receive an IMAX release

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.

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• Fans and influencers screened the first 25 minutes of The Mandalorian and Grogu in IMAX on May the 4th
• Reactions were largely positive, with particular praise for the action sequences and Ludwig Göransson’s score
• The most common critique: the film feels more like elevated TV than a true big-screen Star Wars epic
• Most footage shown in trailers and clips comes from these opening minutes, suggesting big surprises still lie ahead
• The film — the first Star Wars theatrical release in seven years — opens May 22, 2026

Star Wars is back in theaters for the first time since 2019, and on May the 4th, a select group of fans got to see what that actually looks like. The Mandalorian and Grogu screened its first 25-plus minutes at IMAX theaters around the world Monday night, and the early word from those lucky enough to be in those seats is — cautiously, enthusiastically — good.

The fan events, held at 7 p.m. local time with poster giveaways included, were sold out in major markets like New York, Texas, and California almost immediately. Those who couldn’t score tickets could catch a three-and-a-half-minute special look on Disney+, but the people inside those IMAX houses had something much more substantial to chew on.

And they’ve been talking ever since.

What Fans Actually Saw

The footage covers the film’s opening sequence — a snow-bound action scene that’s been teased across trailers, press screenings, and CinemaCon — but now seen in full, at scale, the way director Jon Favreau intended it to be experienced. Din Djarin and Grogu mount an AT-RT and careen downhill past a barrage of AT-ATs controlled by an unnamed Imperial warlord. It’s chaotic, kinetic, and — in IMAX — enormous.

The 25 minutes also introduce the Hutts as major players and give audiences their first real look at Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward, a New Republic leader and former Rebel Alliance pilot. Jeremy Allen White voices Rotta the Hutt — son of the late Jabba — and the mission structure is now clearer: Din and Grogu have been enlisted by the New Republic to rescue Rotta in exchange for information on a mystery target.

Also confirmed in the cast: Matthew Willig as Hogsbreth, and — in a genuinely unexpected piece of trivia — Martin Scorsese as an Ardennian shopkeeper named Hugo.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1bNF7SHtzVI%3Fsi%3DhJ248sMAJXUIELlF

The Reactions: Mostly Thrilled, With One Big Caveat

The consensus from fans and influencers who attended? The opening is a blast — particularly in IMAX, where the aspect ratio expands to the full 1.43 and Ludwig Göransson’s score fills the room. Multiple attendees specifically called out the sound design and music as highlights.

“Cinematic, epic scale that demands to be seen on the big screen,” one attendee wrote on social media. “Ludwig Göransson’s music gave us goosebumps. Had smiles on our faces the entire time.”

Critic Zach Pope called it “very entertaining,” saying it “reminds me a lot of the 1st season + the OG Star Wars trilogy in terms of story structure & feel. Action is MASSIVE, the Hutts have a huge part, & I can’t wait to see the rest!”

Star Wars podcaster William Devereux was equally enthusiastic about the two leads. “Din Djarin is arguably the coolest he’s ever been, and Grogu is as adorable as always,” he wrote. “While the movie’s stakes aren’t the highest, a lot of what the trailers show is from early in the film. So hopefully we’ll get some fun surprises. I love this duo and can’t wait for May 22nd!”

One fan summed up the Pedro Pascal energy perfectly: “Mando is still basically Star Wars John Wick and isn’t aiming for the leg when taking out bad guys.”

But the most consistent note — the one that keeps appearing in reaction after reaction — is that the film, at least in its opening stretch, feels like very good television rather than a proper cinematic event. Film reviewer Tyler Disney put it plainly: “The opening scene deserves credit, it’s genuinely cool. The CGI still needs some polish, but if the film keeps that momentum, it could easily turn into a hit. I wouldn’t say I didn’t like it, but something felt off when the opening credits rolled — it didn’t quite feel like a Star Wars movie. It came across more like a streaming TV film than a big-screen experience.”

Another attendee echoed that ambivalence but landed in a warmer place: “So, in many ways, these 25 minutes feel like an exciting premiere of a big streaming TV series, one that provides some big setpieces and tees up an exciting season of adventures. The Mandalorian and Grogu is on the big screen — on IMAX, no less, the biggest screens. That gives everything an extra sense of importance, scale, and excitement. This might not be a return to a Star Wars movie from the old days, but the scale is certainly there.”

Given that the movie literally grew out of a TV show — Favreau has confirmed it was originally conceived as Season 4 of The Mandalorian before the 2023 writers’ strike pushed him to rethink it as a feature — that critique is probably unavoidable. What matters is whether the second and third acts deliver something the show never could.

What’s Being Hidden — and Why That’s Actually Exciting

Here’s the thing that has fans most intrigued: nearly everything Disney has shown publicly — trailers, TV spots, the clips that ran at CinemaCon and on Good Morning America, the footage screened Monday night — appears to come from the film’s first 25 minutes or so. That’s a very deliberate choice.

It’s also very on-brand for Favreau. When The Mandalorian first premiered on Disney+ in 2019, he convinced the studio to keep Baby Yoda entirely out of the marketing until after the first episode dropped. That gamble paid off in a way few pop culture moments have in recent memory. The theory circulating now is that he’s pulling the same move at feature scale — with the Mando-Grogu-Rotta the Hutt trio at the center of an adventure that nobody outside the production has actually seen.

“A large piece of the movie is being hidden,” one analysis noted. “And we think it centers on Mando and Grogu teaming up with Rotta the Hutt for an adventure — all three of them together — and the filmmakers simply don’t want any of that to get out.”

For spoiler-averse fans, that’s genuinely exciting. There are reportedly around 110 minutes of film that the public has seen essentially nothing of.

The Bigger Picture: Star Wars Needs This to Work

The enthusiasm from Monday’s screenings matters more than usual because the box office tracking for The Mandalorian and Grogu hasn’t been spectacular. Current projections have the film opening to around $80–85 million domestically over Memorial Day weekend — a decent number in isolation, but one that draws uncomfortable comparisons to Solo: A Star Wars Story, whose 2018 underperformance effectively shut down Lucasfilm’s standalone movie ambitions for years.

On the critical side, prediction markets currently have the film landing around a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes — solidly Fresh, just shy of the 75% needed for Certified Fresh. That would put it above Solo‘s 69% but well below Rogue One‘s 84%, which remains the gold standard for non-Skywalker Saga Star Wars films.

Nielsen data released this week offered some context for the franchise’s current cultural footprint: U.S. viewers consumed 33 billion minutes — 550 million hours — of Star Wars content in 2025. A New Hope led all titles, followed by The Phantom Menace and Rogue One. On the TV side, Andor topped the list, followed by Skeleton Crew and The Mandalorian. The appetite is clearly there. The question is whether audiences who’ve been burned by recent Star Wars entries will show up opening weekend.

Favreau, for his part, has been direct about what he’s trying to do. “Even though in our hearts we are Star Wars fans, we make it for Star Wars fans, and we know that there’s a certain set of expectations around what Star Wars should be,” he told the Associated Press. “There is the responsibility to invite a whole new generation of people into Star Wars. That means that if a Star Wars fan brings somebody who’s not, they’ve got to have as good of a time as the fans do. I want to make the next generation feel the way about Star Wars that I did when I saw it for the first time.”

Sigourney Weaver, who saw the original Star Wars just before her own career took off, put it in personal terms during a recent interview. “I was looking at three lucky actors who’d made it to the big time and were in this glorious thing,” she recalled. “I hope I get that lucky someday to be in a movie that has people crowded into a theater all cheering for it.”

Based on Monday night’s reactions, at least, there’s reason to think she might get her wish. One fan summed up the feeling as simply as anyone: “I got some of the old Star Wars feelings back. For me, it’s nice to be back in a galaxy far, far away with characters I enjoy.”

The Mandalorian and Grogu opens in theaters — and IMAX — on May 22.

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