Netflix has cut the "extended version" of Tarantino's The Hateful Eight into a 4-part miniseries

Quentin Tarantino’s cowboy-noir bloodbath The Hateful Eight was a long damn movie when it entered theaters back in 2015, and it’s still a long damn movie now, with even its most conservatively cut version clocking in at nearly three hours in length. (It’s not for nothing that Tarantino’s preferred version of the film came with an actual, no-fooling intermission.) Which might help explain why Netflix took a rather unprecedented step with the film’s “extended version,” which arrived on its servers today: Cutting it up into four parts, and airing it as a “miniseries”, instead of a straight film.

To be clear, the full film is also still up on the service, for those who’d rather see its theatrical version in a more traditional format. But if you have a hankering to digest Tarantino’s tale of bad men staring tensely at each other in an isolated cabin in four 5o-minute chunks, instead, well, now you can. The abrupt endings of the “episodes” admittedly don’t do much for the movie’s already leisurely pacing—this is a film with a lot of set up before anything more exciting than a terse conversation actually kicks off—but it’ll definitely make getting through the whole thing a little bit more organized for you and anybody you’re trying to watch it with. (Your subsequent arguments about whatever the hell Tarantino was trying to say here about race, sexism, and violence in America, presumably, will go a little more off the rails.)

That “extended version” moniker is a tad deceptive, though: While the full runtime for the miniseries version of the movie clocks in at about 211 minutes, each episode also contains roughly 8 minutes of opening and ending credits that were mostly absent from the original film. As such, the miniseries reportedly mostly resembles the 187-minute extended “roadshow” version that Tarantino toured around the country in 70 mm, give or take a few edits, extra scenes, and alternate takes here and there.