Why ‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair' May Never Get a Home Release

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a day ago

Film fans everywhere have surely seen Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2. But only a select few have seen those two films edited together, with minor but important changes, and renamed Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. The rare print, which runs 258 minutes plus an intermission, has only played in public a handful of times, including a July run at Tarantino's Vista Theater in Los Angeles. That got fans outside of Los Angeles wondering, 'Will we ever get to see this thing in our homes?'
The answer, according to Tarantino, is maybe not. The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Django Unchained, and so many more recently appeared on The Church of Tarantino podcast for a long-ranging interview. Among the topics of discussion was The Whole Bloody Affair and why it hasn't had a physical release. Rumors had long swirled that the film was stuck behind red tape over the fact that it combines two separate film entities, but Tarantino pushed back on that a bit. 'You guys have speculated a lot, and so have a lot of people on the internet,' he said. 'I understand where they're coming from, [but] they're all wrong.'
'Basically, I didn't want to do anything with it until I owned it. I own it now,' the director continued. 'So I wanted to wait until the rights were completely all on me. I'm not waiting to put it out. I've got the print. I show it from time to time at the New Beverly. You can see it. It's there. [And] I love my old work, but I'm not all that about mining it and taking from it and spinning off from it. I'm always thinking about the next thing. So I was going to do a zillion things with Kill Bill, but then when I finished it, [I thought] 'Well, that was such a fucking hard movie.' I was like, 'Okay, I'm done with that for a while.' But I wanted to own it.'
Okay, so he owns it. Will he release it on 4K and Blu-ray? 'But also, I got to say, in this world [where] everything is available and everything is for profit and everything is a chip to be sold on the market because everything is owned by corporations, that's not owned by a corporation. That's owned by me,' Tarantino continued. 'And the fact that you have to come to my theater to see it, and it's not just sitting on a stack of DVDs and Blu-rays that you get around to watching eventually. It comes out on Blu [and you're like] 'Yeah, I'll buy that!' And then, like a month later, you get around to taking the plastic off.'
'The minute it becomes in your hand, it just means less, all right,' he continued. 'But the thing is, the fact that it's playing at a theater, now you guys came to see it, and you got it in just the best way. And no, you can't lend it to your friend. Now you're going to have to tell your friends about it, and they're going to be jealous of you. That just happens so fucking rarely now that there's something really, really cool about having something that's just not a button away. If you want to watch Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, it's not a push-button away. You've got to wait for me to show it.'
That's certainly not what fans who don't live in or around Los Angeles want to hear, especially since Tarantino has only chosen to show it at his theaters a few times over the past decade. But now that he does own the film, maybe that will become a little more frequent. Maybe it'll play in other theaters. And the fact that you don't know is exactly the point. That makes it special.
At this point, you might be wondering what makes The Whole Bloody Affair so special. Can't you just watch Part 1 and Part 2 back-to-back, and it's the same thing? The answer is yes, but also no. There are a few small but very impactful changes in this edit that really do give it a grander feel. The first one is the removal of the final scene of Part 1, when the audience learns that the Bride's daughter is still alive. By removing that scene, we learn that she's alive at the same time the Bride does, near the end of the film, and it's a gut punch. The other big change is that the Crazy 88 action scene is fully in color. No black and white to get an R-rating. And, well, that's mainly where The Whole Bloody Affair gets its title. Plus, there's just something to be said for watching the entire saga in a single sitting that makes it feel much more epic. For our money, The Whole Bloody Affair is easily Tarantino's best movie.
The film had a two-week run at the Vista back in July, but no other showtimes are currently planned. However, we'd imagine following the schedules for that theater and the New Beverly, both of which Tarantino owns, is probably your best bet to see when the film is playing again.
Listen to the full Tarantino interview at this link. And here's an embed of just this section of the chat.
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