What a relief it is that Quentin Tarantino went ahead with The Hateful Eight, even after a nasty episode involving a script leak that was once thought to have turned the director off the project for good. After licking his wounds, the director found that he still felt strongly enough about the story to proceed, and as a result, this fall is about to get rocked by a tornado of bloody, badass mayhem – the kind only Tarantino could dream up.
Today brings our first look at The Hateful Eight, via an unveiled cover for Entertainment Weekly. Teasing the appearances of Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kurt Russell, the image doesn’t give much of anything away about the Western, but rest assured that EW’s cover story will delve deep into what exactly audiences can expect to get from The Hateful Eight when it opens later this year.
Here’s what we know so far – Jackson plays Major Marquis Warren, a union soldier who turned tail and embarked on a new career path as a deadly bounty hunter. Russell plays another bounty hunter named John Ruth, and Leigh takes on the role of Daisy Domergue, the fugitive Ruth has been tasked with apprehending.
Those are just three of the eight gunslingers who take refuge inside Minnie’s Haberdashery during a particularly horrific blizzard. Faced with a room full of faces they know they can’t trust, each of the eight will have to think fast and draw faster if they’re to get out alive. Tarantino described the project, smaller in scale than either Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained, as having “a Western Iceman Cometh kind of vibe about it.” Comparisons could also be drawn to one of the director’s best-known works – Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino said:
“A bunch of guys in a room who can’t trust each other. That wasn’t a marching order when I sat down to write the script, but pretty quickly I realized this is kind of a nice coming-full-circle.”
The Hateful Eight opens sometime this fall. Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Channing Tatum, Demian Bichir and Bruce Dern co-star. Here’s the cover, and an official plot synopsis.
In THE HATEFUL EIGHT, set six or eight or twelve years after the Civil War, a stagecoach hurtles through the wintry Wyoming landscape. The passengers, bounty hunter John Ruth (Russell) and his fugitive Daisy Domergue (Leigh), race towards the town of Red Rock where Ruth, known in these parts as “The Hangman,” will bring Domergue to justice. Along the road, they encounter two strangers: Major Marquis Warren (Jackson), a black former union soldier turned infamous bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix (Goggins), a southern renegade who claims to be the town’s new Sheriff. Losing their lead on the blizzard, Ruth, Domergue, Warren and Mannix seek refuge at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a stagecoach stopover on a mountain pass. When they arrive at Minnie’s, they are greeted not by the proprietor but by four unfamiliar faces. Bob (Bichir), who’s taking care of Minnie’s while she’s visiting her mother, is holed up with Oswaldo Mobray (Roth), the hangman of Red Rock, cow-puncher Joe Gage (Madsen), and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Dern). As the storm overtakes the mountainside stopover, our eight travelers come to learn they may not make it to Red Rock after all…
