So: Who’s in the Adventures of Cliff Booth cast, and who will they be playing?

Since April of last year, rumors about the thirteenth film from David Fincher—the upcoming Netflix production currently being referred to as The Adventures of Cliff Booth—have held the majority of the film-bro community’s curiosity. Now, in the wake of a 64-second long Super Bowl trailer (which, it’s worth noting, never actually drops an official title for the film) and a (still-unannounced) release date presumably set for sometime this year, it has our attention. The film, shrouded in a Quentin Tarantino production’s standard veil of secrecy, is an unconventional sequel to Tarantino’s ninth (and I’d argue best) film, the grand late-period summation Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

What makes this project so unusual is that it represents the union of two of the best directors of their generation (Fincher is seven months older), with one master stepping in to take the directorial reins of a sequel written by the other. There’s no real precedent for something like this I could come up with, which perhaps explains why it has been a lightning rod in some corners of the internet. Erik Messerschmidt served as Director of Photography on the project, but Tarantino was reportedly on set for most of the shoot, sitting directly next to Fincher (a detail that led some fans running out of patience with Tarantino’s stubborn self-imposed 10-film mandate to claim he’s “shadow directed” the film, and that it will be a Fincher movie in name alone.)

But with some imagination, the project is an intuitive fit that makes sense for both collaborators. It’s not a stretch for Tarantino, who rose up the Hollywood ranks first as both a screenwriter and uncredited script doctor, writing Bonnie-and-Clyde flavored love-on-the-run capers and inserting comic book lore into nuclear submarine thrillers, although it’s been thirty years since he wrote a script he didn’t direct (1996’s neo-exploitation vampire-stripper classic From Dusk Til Dawn.) Tarantino has also always been up for a bizarre experiment, like directing a Mother’s Day episode of Must See TV, a two-part CSI, or his 2007 double feature with Robert Rodriguez. Lately, in what may be an attempt to stay busy doing literally anything except making his tenth and final movie, he’s penned an homage to mass-market paperback literature with the novelization of OUATIH (published in 2021, several years after the film) and published a collection of movie criticism, Cinema Speculation; he’s just announced plans to direct an “old fashioned British farce play” in London’s West End in late 2026 or early 2027.

The master technician David Fincher, on the other hand, has never fashioned himself as a writer. He never takes credit on screenplays, though he works closely with screenwriters to help shape the narratives for all his films. In the past, he has been best served by taking on writers with strong, distinct voices and editing them to dig out the best, smartest versions of themselves in the scripts they write for him. But in adapting a Tarantino screenplay, he’s taking on the strongest authorial voice of his career—and maybe his greatest challenge.

This is part of what makes The Adventures of Cliff Booth so intriguing. Although they’re very different directors stylistically, they share an affinity for old-Hollywood lore, something Tarantino showcased in the first installment of this series, a movie obsessed with recreating the context of its moment, from its LA streetscapes painstakingly dressed with period-accurate movie billboards from the summer of ‘69 to the crackling diegetic music, ads, and DJ shpiel floating out of cars and radios into the air. “Alfonso Cuaron had Roma and Mexico City, 1970,” Tarantino said at the time. “I had LA and 1969.”