Netflix got Quentin Tarantino to turn a movie into a miniseries — should we expect more?

Quentin Tarantino has brought an “extended version” of his controversial roadshow western The Hateful Eight to Netflix, but not the way you’d think. It’s a miniseries composed of four 50-minute episodes, and reactions have been confused, to say the least. Why would a cohesive movie, one which already had six “chapters,” be broken up into four?

Now, Tarantino himself has spoken — and he tells Slashfilm that it’s the experiment Netflix wanted him to produce:

So Netflix came to us and said, “Hey, look, if you’d be interested–if there’s even more footage, [and] if you’d be interested in putting it together in a way that we could show it as three or four episodes, depending on how much extra footage you have, we’d be willing to do that.”

Tarantino says the “extended version” has around 25 minutes of new content, and the scenes don’t play out quite the same way. In particular, the episodic format let him show a key sequence from the perspective of different characters (I won’t spoil it here).

We know Netflix has been experimenting with new formats like interactive, choose-your-own-adventure stories like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and You vs. Wild, in addition to producing its own TV shows with the high-end production values that were previously rare outside film. Now, Tarantino has raised the intriguing possibility that movies don’t just have to be movies — and that Netflix is interested in finding out.

There’s more in the full interview, including that Tarantino has already written a script for a possible Star Trek movie, and has a director’s cut of Django Unchained ready to go.