Bloomberg reports the director is letting his contract lapse next year, with the Brad Pitt-led Cliff Booth film closing out the partnership that began with House of Cards.
David Fincher's thirteen-year run at Netflix is ending. Bloomberg reported the director has decided against renewing his deal with the streamer, a partnership that started in 2013 when he signed on to direct and produce the first season of House of Cards.
The arrangement gave Fincher a level of freedom rare in the studio system. Under it, he made Mank and The Killer, ran the animated anthology Love, Death & Robots as executive producer, and created Mindhunter, the serial-killer procedural whose long-rumoured third season now looks further away than ever. His current deal runs out next year, and reports suggest he isn't picking up the option.
The last film to come out of that arrangement is already locked and dated. The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, Fincher's next feature, will get a two-week exclusive run in IMAX theatres worldwide from November 25 before it lands on Netflix on December 23.
The project has an unusual backstory. It grew out of a script Quentin Tarantino had written for what would have been his tenth and final film, before he shelved it. Brad Pitt, who's reprising his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood role as stuntman-turned-fixer Cliff Booth, was reportedly keen to keep playing the character and asked Tarantino whether someone else could direct in his place. Fincher stepped in and, per the reporting, got Tarantino's sign-off.
Set in 1977, eight years after the events of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the film finds Booth working as a Hollywood fixer rather than a stunt double. According to the official synopsis, he's pulled into a case involving talent agent Karen Crosby, played by Elizabeth Debicki, on behalf of her client Charlie Peters, a TV star known for performing his own stunts, played by Scott Caan. The cast rounds out with Carla Gugino as Peters's wife Toni and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Roderick "Hot Rod" Harrison, a former football champion turned screen star. Matt Groove and JB Tadena play the Verdusco brothers, gangsters described as causing havoc across the city. The synopsis frames it plainly: what used to be a fairytale is now a crime story.
Whether any of Fincher's Netflix-era work would have existed without the streamer's money and hands-off approach is genuinely hard to say. Studios don't typically hand a filmmaker this much rope, and Netflix did for over a decade.
What happens now is the bigger question. A director of Fincher's stature walking away from a streaming home naturally raises the obvious possibility, a theatrical-first deal somewhere else. Nothing has been announced on that front. For now, all eyes are on November 25, when Cliff Booth gets his IMAX rollout, and December 23, when the Netflix chapter of Fincher's career quietly closes out.
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