Most of us are up to our necks in excitement waiting for this holiday season’s release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but I have to keep remembering (with utter glee and relish, I might add) that we’re ALSO getting a Christmas full of hate — Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, that is. Fittingly, Tarantino’s eighth film comes out in a 70mm Roadshow edition on December 25 and opens wide on January 8, 2016. This truly is a cinephile holiday miracle, and even more enticing now thanks to the release of another trailer for the snowbound western thriller.
I love that we already know each of the characters’ names and roughly what they do, and a basic gist of the plot, but we don’t really know anything else about it. That’s so awesome! It really seems to me like it’s going to be a paranoid whodunit of sorts, with Kurt Russell’s Hangman attempting to get Jennifer Jason Leigh’s prisoner to her date with destiny and retrieve a $10,000 reward. But when you’re in a cabin full of cutthroats, reprobates, and people who aren’t who they say they are, getting that money will be easier said then done. I’ve said it before, but Samuel L. Jackson’s outfit is directly inspired by the title character in Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence. Which is extra funny to me because Jackson’s character won’t stop talking.
The Hateful Eight marks Tarantino’s second full-fledged western following 2012’s Django Unchained, and at Comic-Con this year, the filmmaker said a director can’t really call themselves a “western director” until they make three, so he’ll likely have another six-shooters-and-spurs movie to his name before he retires. I for one am a-okay with that.
Let us know what you think of this new trailer, and about how great this filmic holiday slate seems to be, in the comments below!
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Image: The Weinstein Company
Kyle Anderson is the Weekend Editor and a film and TV critic for Nerdist.com. Follow him on Twitter!
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