The trailer is out for Netflix’s The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, and Brad Pitt is having a little fun at Leonardo DiCaprio’s expense while bringing his Oscar-winning Once Upon a Time in Hollywood character back. The sequel shifts Cliff into 1977, where his old stuntman skills have found some unexpected new uses. Directed by David Fincher from Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay, the film sends Pitt’s unflappable Hollywood fixer into another round of trouble.

There is a particularly neat bit of Hollywood arithmetic buried in the trailer. Cliff may have moved on from being Rick Dalton’s stunt double, but the memory of that partnership clearly has not disappeared.

The joke arrives with exactly the kind of deadpan timing that made Cliff Booth such an entertaining counterweight to Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. When the trailer touches on why Cliff is no longer doubling for his former employer, Booth explains that Rick “got too fat.” 

It is a quick line, but it lands because of the history attached to it: Pitt and DiCaprio spent Tarantino’s 2019 film playing two halves of the same Hollywood machine, with Pitt’s stuntman repeatedly cleaning up the messes created by Leonardo DiCaprio’s increasingly insecure actor.

The new film, however, has moved Cliff into a different corner of the business. It is 1977, eight years after the events of the original movie, and Hollywood no longer has quite the same use for a Manson-family-fighting stuntman. Fincher’s trailer instead presents Cliff as a fixer who can bartend, operate a projection booth and handle the sort of problems that require someone willing to work outside conventional Hollywood rules. That setup gives Pitt room to preserve Cliff’s laconic personality while placing him in a different era and professional orbit.

Brad Pitt’s Deadliest Stuntman Returns in First Trailer for ‘The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth’

But the DiCaprio gag is only one piece of the larger Pitt comeback story.

The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is an interesting companion to Brad Pitt’s other 2026 release, Heart of the Beast. While Cliff is navigating Hollywood's back corridors, Pitt’s James Belmont is dealing with something considerably less glamorous: survival in the Alaskan wilderness alongside his combat dog, Odin. The film reunites Pitt with David Ayer after Fury, and its screenplay by Cameron Alexander appeared on the 2017 Black List of most-liked unproduced screenplays.

The contrast is striking. One movie puts Pitt behind the wheel and back into Tarantino’s Hollywood mythology, that he now has turned into a novel, while the other strips him down to a soldier fighting his way through the wilderness. Heart of the Beast is scheduled for September 25, while The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth will have a two-week global IMAX run beginning November 25 before arriving on Netflix December 23.

For Cliff Booth, though, the next chapter is still about Hollywood, unfinished business and the kind of trouble that apparently follows him wherever he goes. 

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What do you think of Pitt’s Rick Dalton joke in the new trailer? Share your thoughts in the comments.