Everett Collection
Lionsgate said today it’s partnered with Quentin Tarantino for distribution rights to three of the director’s iconic films – Kill Bill Volumes I & II and Jackie Brown.
Beginning with Reservoir Dogs, a Lionsgate library favorite for nearly 20 years, “we’ve grown what is now Hollywood’s largest portfolio of Tarantino films to include Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight and Death Proof in addition to the movies we just picked up,” said CEO Jon Feltheimer on the company’s post-earning conference call.
He said the studio and Tarantino team will celebration Kill Bill’s 20th anniversary later this year with a new, remastered 4K edition.
“It was a coup for us to get the three Quentin Tarantino movies,” said Jim Packer, head of worldwide television and digital, on the call. We have eight, which gives our library a unique situation in Hollywood, and we want to take advantage of that.”
Tarantino, who recently published a book Cinema Speculation, talked with Deadline from Cannes about his latest film, The Movie Critic. The film, which goes into pre-production next month, is set in California in 1977 and, he told Deadline, “is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.”
Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), a martial arts revenge thriller stars Uma Thurman as the Bride, a former assassin who swears revenge on her former colleages played by Lucy Liu, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah and Vivica A. Fox and their leader, Bill (David Carradine) after they leave her for dead. Her quest continues In Volume 2 (2004).
Jackie Brown (1997) an homage to 1970s blaxpoitation films based on Elmore Leonard’s 1992 novel Rum Punch, stars Pam Grier as a flight attendant caught smuggling money. With Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton and Robert De Niro.