When Quentin Tarantino took a meeting with Fortnite, he had a hunch how it might go down.
“I showed up to the meeting thinking that they would want to license characters and they want to get my ideas about what could be a fun thing to do,” Tarantino explained in front of a capacity crowd gathered for a special Fortnite Now Playing event held at his own Vista Theater in Los Angeles on Nov. 19. “But no, they had something else in mind.”
That something else: “They very innocently asked me, ‘Do you have something that’s, like, eight to 12 minutes long that could be good for our purposes?’ Now they didn’t say, ‘Can you make sure that your iconic characters are wrapped up inside of that?’ But that was implied.”
Fortunately for the folks at Fortnite, the filmmaker happened to have something buried deep in the first draft of Kill Bill that might be just what they were looking for to help them launch a new chapter of the blockbuster video game franchise. Titled The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge, the project was pulled from the original script that Tarantino never filmed because, as he explained, “We couldn’t do it, it was just too crazy, it was just too much action.” (For reference, Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Volume 2 have a combined run time of four hours and 41 minutes.)
Yuki’s Revenge follows Yuki, the twin sister of Gogo Yubari, as she hunts down Uma Thurman’s The Bride to avenge her sister’s death. Gogo, the bodyguard of Lucy Liu’s O-Ren Ishii, was assassinated along with the Crazy 88 and O-Ren in a series of blood-soaked sequences from Volume 1. So, Tarantino dusted off the draft, sent it over to Fortnite, “and they were, like, ‘Let’s do this.’ And here we are.”
Tarantino was joined at the Vista by Thurman, who reprised her role as The Bride for Yuki’s Revenge, and Sean Fennessey, The Ringer’s head of content and The Big Picture podcast host, who moderated a conversation and introduced a series of clips. The audience was filled with Fortnite fans, press, influencers and VIPs (including filmmaker Eli Roth).
Sean Fennessey asked Thurman what it felt like to reprise her iconic character for the animated short, which required more than just lending her voice, as she also acted out the scenes with the help of motion capture technology. “I thought it was so cool. I mean, this is such a new audience for the movie,” she said, adding that she loved how it brought her back together with Tarantino. “We’ve had an amazing life in movies together, some of the best imaginable. I dare anyone to have more extraordinary experiences than I’ve had with this man.”
Tarantino, who directed Yuki’s Revenge and voiced the character of Bill, offered that he was stoked by “the tremendous amount of crossover” between Fortnite fans and Kill Bill fans. “I think it’s a really good way to launch the new season,” he said. “This is a lost chapter that I always wanted to see the light of day.”
Powered by Unreal Engine in partnership with Epic Games, The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge premieres in Fortnite on Nov. 30 at 2 p.m. ET. Fans will also be able to see it on the big screen with Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, an exclusive theatrical run that combines Volume 1 and Volume 2 in a way that Tarantino originally had intended it to be shown. It debuts in participating theaters in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom on Dec. 5.
