Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood is a celebration of all things Tinsel Town. Beyond its plot about fading star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) battling the Manson Family, the movie is a gift to fans of ’60s Hollywood. Unless you’re a fan of Bruce Lee, that is. In the most controversial scene of the movie, the slovenly Booth easily defeats Lee (Mike Moh), who comes off like an incompetent braggart.
Reducing the greatest film action star of all time to a jobber for Booth irritated Once Upon a Time‘s original viewers. So it’s shocking that the second trailer for the upcoming sequel The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth would remind us of it. Yet, throughout the trailer, various characters refer to Booth less as Rick Dalton’s stunt man and more as the guy who beat Bruce Lee. Fortunately, however, the trailer does offer some room for revision.
Set eight years after the events of Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth finds the titular stuntman looking for work after his partnership with Dalton has ended (“He got too fat,” says Booth in the trailer, probably on all that I-Talian food). Things seem to turn around when an agent (Elizabeth Debicki) for actor Charlie Peters (Scott Caan) calls him up for work. But what could the work be, given that Charlie does his own stunts? The trailer lets that question linger until its final moments, when Cliff hints that Peters has gotten caught up with some Filipino gangsters and needs help getting out. Cliff can help, because he beat up the Manson Family. And also Bruce Lee.
That last point seems of greater interest to the characters in the trailer, even more so than the fact that Cliff and Rick beat a group of Manson Family members (played by up-and-coming stars such as Austin Butler and Mikey Madison). Everyone from Peters’s wife Toni (Carla Gugino) to Blaxploitation star Hot Rod Harrison (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) brings it up. For his part, Cliff tries to downplay the event, saying it was a long time ago, and had been exaggerated over the years.
In other words, Cliff is revising the story, which fits with the original movie’s theme. After all, Cliff and Rick’s heroics saved Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) from the fate she suffered in our world. Revision is also a favorite theme of Tarantino’s. However, Tarantino only wrote the script for Cliff Booth, letting David Fincher step in to direct. And Fincher, who demands endless takes of one scene, is not known for being freewheeling and improvisational.
So what does that mean for the legend of Cliff Booth and the diminishment of Bruce Lee? We can’t tell from this trailer alone, but it is clear that the sequel isn’t afraid of making viewers as uncomfortable as its predecessor. But, then again, that’s Hollywood: sensational, unreliable, and ultimately pure fantasy.
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth comes to theaters on November 25, 2026 and to Netflix on December 23, 2026.
