Trailer
The Hateful Eight Trailer, and How the Film That Nearly Vanished Got Made
A first teaser is rarely the story. This one mattered because the film in it had already been called off in public.
INT. PROJECTION BOOTH — DAWN
Published
In August 2015 the first teaser for The Hateful Eight went out, a few months ahead of release and after a run of character posters. On its own that is routine. What made it worth noting is that the film had been publicly abandoned a year and a half earlier by the person making it.
The film that was called off
In January 2014 the script leaked, having been given to a small circle of actors, and Tarantino responded by pulling the project rather than accelerating it. He said he would not direct it next, that he would publish the screenplay instead, and that he might return to the idea within about five years. He also went to court over the leak's publication. Deadline reported the leak and the shelving as they happened, and at that point the reasonable expectation was that the film did not exist as a film.
What brought it back was a reading. In April 2014, Tarantino directed a live staged reading of the unmade script for Film Independent at LACMA with a cast assembled for the night. He told the audience from the stage that this was a first draft, and that there would be a second and a third, an announcement disguised as a caveat. Production began in January 2015 near Telluride, Colorado, and the teaser followed that August.
What the teaser had to sell
The teaser also had an unusually awkward job. What it was advertising is a chamber piece: an ensemble led by Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh, confined for most of its length to a single room in a blizzard, with the tension coming from who is lying rather than from anything a trailer can show. That is close to the hardest thing to cut a teaser out of, because the material a trailer normally reaches for (scale, movement, spectacle) is the material this film withholds on purpose.
Which explains the emphasis it settled on. The pitch was the cast, the register and the director's name rather than the plot, and the posters that preceded it did the same thing by presenting the ensemble as a set of separately labelled figures. Selling a film on who is in a room, rather than on what happens in it, is the honest version of the problem.
What the release turned out to be
The film opened on 25 December 2015 in a limited roadshow presentation on 70mm, ahead of the wide release on 8 January 2016. The roadshow was not decoration. The film had been shot in Ultra Panavision 70 by Robert Richardson, a format effectively unused for decades, and the 70mm engagements were the version built for that negative. Reviving a projection format for a commercial release means installing equipment in cinemas that no longer have it, which is a strange amount of trouble for a chamber piece set largely in one room, and which is rather the point of the gesture.
The most durable outcome had nothing to do with the format. Ennio Morricone wrote the score, his first Western in roughly forty years, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for it. It was the only competitive Oscar he ever won, after five earlier nominations across a career of several hundred scores. A film that was cancelled in January 2014 produced, two years later, the award that a fifty-year body of work had not.
Why the leak mattered more than the spoilers
The leaked document was a first draft, and the reading was presented as one, with rewrites promised out loud. The finished film is not that draft. That distinction is what the episode was actually about: the objection was not that an ending had escaped, but that an unfinished thing had been published as though it were finished, and the response (shelve it, read it aloud in a theatre, then rewrite and shoot it) reads as an argument about who decides when a script is done.
As a case it belongs with the films this desk tracks for the opposite reason to most of them. The usual pattern is an announcement that never becomes a film. This is the rarer one: an unmaking that got reversed, where the trailer is the evidence. The sequel tracker records the more common outcome entry by entry, and the method behind those statuses is the same test applied here, what is on the record, and when.
Questions about the trailer and the film
When did the first Hateful Eight trailer arrive?
The official teaser went online in August 2015, following a set of character posters, with the film then a few months from release. A fuller trailer followed later in the year.
Why was a teaser for this film treated as news?
Because eighteen months earlier the film had been publicly abandoned. In January 2014 the script leaked after being circulated to a small group of actors, and Tarantino said he would not direct it next, that he would publish it instead and perhaps return to the idea within five years. Deadline reported both the leak and the shelving. A teaser meant the reversal was complete and the film was actually finished.
What changed his mind?
A staged reading. In April 2014 Tarantino directed a live reading of the unmade script for Film Independent at LACMA with a hand-picked cast, and told the audience that what they were hearing was a first draft and that there would be a second and a third, which is how the project came back. Shooting began in January 2015 near Telluride, Colorado.
What was unusual about how the film was released?
It opened on 25 December 2015 as a limited roadshow presentation on 70mm film before the wide release on 8 January 2016. The roadshow version was the point rather than a novelty: the film was shot in Ultra Panavision 70 by cinematographer Robert Richardson, a format long out of use, and the roadshow prints were how that was meant to be seen.
Did the score win anything?
Yes, and it is the detail most worth remembering. Ennio Morricone's score, his first Western in roughly forty years, won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, the only competitive Oscar he won, after five previous nominations.
Was the leaked script the film that got made?
Not as leaked. What circulated in January 2014 was a first draft, and the reading was explicitly presented as such, with rewrites promised from the stage. The released film differs from that draft, which is the ordinary fate of a first draft and the reason the leak was a problem about control rather than about spoilers alone.