‘Cliff Booth’ Trailer Is Finally Here

I'll just say it: I didn't love what I see here.

The first real trailer for "The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth" has dropped two weeks out from release — it’s close to 3 minutes. David Fincher directing a Quentin Tarantino script. Brad Pitt back as Cliff Booth. On paper, this is the easiest sell of the season. And yet here we are, with a good chunk of people scratching their heads and asking why this looks less exciting than it should. Hey, at least the lighting seems to have been somewhat fixed. The footage is much less underlit than in previous teasers.

Here's hoping this is just a case of the marketing team botching their assignment. That happens more often than you'd think. The story being told here seems very loose and byzantine, with lots of characters, and that's not an easy sell.

The gist: it's 1977, eight years after "Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood." Cliff (Pitt) works as a bartender and projectionist while moonlighting as a Hollywood fixer. Agent Karen Crosby (Elizabeth Debicki) hires him on behalf of her client, TV star Charlie Peters (Scott Caan). That pulls Cliff into a noir-tinged world involving Charlie's wife Toni (Carlq Gugino), football-star-turned-actor "Hot Rod" Harrison (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and the gangster Verdusco brothers.

There have been enough red flags surrounding this movie that I'm starting to wonder if the rumor that Tarantino hated a cut he saw is true. I don’t completely buy it since he recently went out of his way to screen the first 17 minutes of the film at AFI, but, hell, what has been reported is that Fincher, supposedly, quit Netflix over this movie. The signs are not encouraging.

Has Netflix also cooled on this thing? It's a fair question to ask. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am. It's still one of our most anticipated titles, but the footage so far has barely cohered. Also, this film has yet to be unveiled for anybody. It’s screening for press on November 17. Does Netflix not see ‘Cliff Booth’ as a potential awards player?

The talent involved is not the issue. Alongside Fincher, Tarantino and Pitt you have Erik Messerschmidt, who won an Oscar, behind the camera as DP. Then there's the music. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are back for their sixth straight Fincher feature, a run that started with their Oscar-winning score for "The Social Network." Yet you barely get a sense of their score in this trailer.

‘Cliff Booth’ opens November 25, over Thanksgiving weekend, exclusively in IMAX, now on only about 200 screens.