Quentin Tarantino: ‘Star Wars’ Is ‘Going Out of Their Way to F

Pretty much everyone is looking forward to seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens this holiday season, but J.J. Abrams’ upcoming movie has at least one person very upset: Quentin Tarantino. The director of The Hateful Eight went off on an expletive-laded rant against Disney, which he claims is using extortion to block screenings of his movie all in the name of keeping the next Star Wars movie in as many theaters as possible.

Tarantino was a guest on The Howard Stern Show and had some harsh words for the Mouse House and how they’re messing up his plans for the 70mm roadshow version of The Hateful Eight, which starts its run on Christmas Day.

We were gonna play at the Cinerama Dome on the 25th. We were gonna open there and play there exclusively for two weeks. And Star Wars was gonna play the two weeks before us. And I grew up in Los Angeles, so I think of the Cinerama Dome as a real big deal and imagine seeing it at the Cinerama Dome. So the thing about it was, Disney, who owns Star Wars, decided, ‘Well, you know what? Maybe we wanna play throughout the entire holiday season.’ So we’re gonna go to the Cinerama Dome and say that they can’t honor their contract with us to show the Hateful Eight.
And the Arclight people that own the Cinerama Dome, said ‘No no, you can’t do that. We have a deal with the Hateful Eight people, and showing it in 70[mm]. That’s what we do.’ […] As of yesterday, Disney came to the Arclight people and said ‘No, you are going to play Star Wars in the Cinerama Dome for the entire holiday season, and if you don’t, if you honor your deal with the Hateful Eight, we will not allow you to have Star Wars, the biggest movie in the world, we will not allow you to show it at any of your Arclight movie theaters.’

Tl;dr Disney is forcing theaters to play Star Wars: The Force Awakens, even if it means breaking a previous agreement to run The Hateful Eight in 70mm. So damn right, Tarantino is angry. He was not done.

They’ve got the biggest movie in the world We’re talking about one effing theater…they are going out of their way to fuck me […] It’s vindictive, it’s mean and it’s extortion. They literally threatened the Arclight. They didn’t need to be this vindictive. There’s a few movies coming out around the same time…none of us are any serious competition to Star Wars.

Tarantino made clear that he has no particular beef with J.J. Abrams or “the Star Wars people” but specifically the people at Disney who are making these decisions. Stern, who is friends with both Abrams and Disney CEO Bob Iger, put out a public plea for Disney to back off. We reached out to Disney for comment and have yet to hear back.

You can listen to this portion of Tarantino’s interview with Stern in its entirety below.