‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair’ Marks the End of a Long Wait for Tarantino Fans

For almost 25 years now, Quentin Tarantino fans have been waiting, in some form or another, for Kill Bill. After Jackie Brown, which arrived three years after Pulp Fiction and preceded by plenty of side projects to tide fans over in between, many years passed with no new Tarantino film in sight. He wrote Kill Bill in the early 2000s, all while consulting with Uma Thurman, who co-created the lead character with Tarantino and therefore was always set to play The Bride, a woman killed on her wedding day who awakes from a multi-year coma and seeks revenge on the former colleagues who wronged her. In fact, when Thurman got pregnant as production got closer, Tarantino delayed the project, pledging to wait for his only possible star. Finally, cameras rolled in 2002, with a teaser trailer released later that year promising “the 4th film by Quentin Tarantino” and, more specifically, that “in the year 2003, Uma Thurman will KILL BILL.”

Then, in the summer of 2003, as the film’s fall release drew closer, came an announcement: Kill Bill had been split into two films, to avoid cutting it down to a more reasonable length from its nearly four-hour runtime. The first part would indeed arrive in 2003 as promised, but the teaser would prove incorrect; the second half of the story (which would presumably include Thurman Killing Bill) would have to wait until 2004. So even fans who rushed out to see the movie on opening night of October 10, 2003, had to wait another six months for the resolution of the movie’s story (and a specific cliffhanger at the end of Vol. 1, as it was now known).

And even after the debut of Kill Bill Vol. 2 in April 2004, some fans waited for what they assumed would be an imminent re-release, via either theaters or home video – one that would recombine Tarantino’s pair of movies into a single narrative. But nothing arrived. Not on DVD, not on the advent of high-definition Blu-ray discs, not around either film’s 10th anniversary, and not when streaming made extra-long versions of Zack Snyder’s Justice League and, hey, even Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight a more viable value-add to various subscriber-hungry services.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Even more frustrating was the fact that a full version now called Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair did exist, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, furthering expectations that it would turn up in more broadly accessible form imminently. Eventually, it played some engagements at a couple of Tarantino-owned movie theaters in Los Angeles. But most fans had to keep waiting. Until now.

Yes, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is coming to movie theaters nationwide, in a version that goes beyond Tarantino’s previous cut. Here a full all-new animated sequence has been incorporated into the film, alongside the various changes that needed to be made (or, rather, un-made) to make two re-edited volumes play once again as a single full film. Select locations will even screen a 70mm print of the movie (and, as with The Brutalist, there will be a built-in intermission).

By now, Tarantino fans have become more accustomed to waiting it out; he typically takes three to four years between movies, and ironically, the time elapsed between 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and the re-release of Kill Bill matches the six-year gap between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill Vol. 1. Because the complete cut of Kill Bill doesn’t exactly count as a new film, whenever Tarantino puts out his tenth and allegedly final movie, it will set a new personal record for time between directorial features. Given that there’s no news of a completed screenplay, Kill Bill could very well mark the halfway point between Hollywood and his next/actual/final project as a director.

Speaking of which: Tarantino has long talked about his plans to retire after directing ten movies, and even scrapped a project called The Movie Critic and gave a spinoff script from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to David Fincher out of concern that they wouldn’t be quite right as his final-ever film as a director. But the whole reason he’s “on” number ten rather than already reaching it is his asterisked counting of Kill Bill as one film, not two. Fair enough that he shot it that way, but the films’ original releases, and how they play in those forms, very much feel like a pair, rather than one long movie split into two parts.

The splitting of Kill Bill might, in retrospect, be the precise moment that Tarantino became particularly self-conscious about his legacy and his output. Doubtless he thought about these things beforehand; he’s too much of a self-taught student of film history to never think about what the arc of his directorial career might look like. But Kill Bill was originally billed as his fourth movie, illustrating a trust that he was no longer “the director of Pulp Fiction” but a brand unto himself – and one that might have an intentionally limited – call it curated? – lifespan. “The 23rd film by Quentin Tarantino” admittedly doesn’t sound as momentous, even if directors from Spielberg to Soderbergh have made stunning careers out of vastly more prolific workloads, and filmmakers like Spielberg and Scorsese have handily disproved Tarantino’s outdated notion of directors losing their fastball if they make movies well past the normal retirement age.

Thematically, Kill Bill also feels like a turning point in Tarantino’s work; though there are elements of revenge in Pulp and Jackie, that entire motivation for the story of Kill Bill turns up again in Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained. That’s not a knock on those movies – especially Basterds, which might, to quote the movie itself, be his masterpiece. The conventional anti-Tarantino wisdom that doing Kill Bill diverted the filmmaker from the warmth and nuance of Jackie Brown strikes me as oversimplified. There’s something thrilling, in fact, about Tarantino’s excavation of genuine human emotion from the over-the-top movie-movie craziness of Kill Bill. (Is that shot of Uma Thurman on the bathroom floor, sobbing with joy, the most moving in the entire Tarantino catalog?) But the physical ambition of the Kill Bill movie(s) (combined with a story that’s largely composed of colorful digressions) certainly informs Tarantino’s subsequent projects, which aim for a sense of both scope and violent catharsis that isn’t really a major part of his earlier films.

So while Basterds may be the movie Tarantino deservedly considers his magnum opus, there’s something inescapable about Kill Bill: Its stylistic maximalism, its financial success, its protracted release. Some have snarked that with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino accidentally made a perfect “final film” too early. But Kill Bill could just as easily sub in as an out-on-top contender. In its place, Tarantino seems to be recreating the only part that can be easily (if not happily) replicated: the waiting.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.