Fincher cut 60 pages from Tarantino's sprawling Cliff Booth script

David Fincher cut about 60 pages from Quentin Tarantino's first draft of The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth.

The draft Fincher first read ran to 230 pages. Fincher described it as essentially two movies, in a joint interview with Tarantino conducted by Empire and reported by Variety.

The finished film runs about two hours and 20 minutes. That is a long way down from a 230-page script. One page of script often equals about one minute of screen time.

Brad Pitt returns as Cliff Booth, the Hollywood stuntman he played in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. The role won Pitt an Oscar. This time the story picks up in 1977, eight years after the earlier film.

Booth has a new line of work. He acts as a Hollywood fixer, the off-the-books problem solver studios once called when a star got into trouble. It is that job that pulls him through the story.

Tarantino wrote the screenplay but chose not to direct it. He handed the film to Fincher after deciding he did not want a sequel to stand as his much-discussed 10th film, according to Variety. The script credit belongs to Tarantino and the directing credit to Fincher.

It reunites Pitt with Fincher for a fourth time. They worked together before on Se7en, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

The release follows two steps. The film opens with an exclusive two-week global run in IMAX cinemas from 25 Nov, then arrives on Netflix on 23 Dec, according to Variety. That gives it a large-screen window before streaming.

For fans, this means a different texture from the last outing. Empire said the new film has the flavour of Elmore Leonard, the American writer known for lean crime paperbacks, in reporting noted by Empire.