Quentin Tarantino's new film to debut on the 50th anniversary of the Manson Family's murders
Reassuring us that his upcoming Charles Manson-related film will be exactly as tasteful and restrained as we’d expect a Quentin Tarantino movie based on a real-life mass murder to be, Sony has confirmed that the director’s upcoming film about the deaths of Sharon Tate and four others at the hands of the Manson Family now has a release date: August 9, 2019, the 50th anniversary of the second and final night of the killing spree now known as the Tate-LaBianca murders.
Sony acquired the film last month, after a protracted wooing process that commenced when Tarantino’s old cinematic home at The Weinstein Co. began imploding in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Tarantino’s new film—his ninth, and the follow-up to 2015's The Hateful Eight—has yet to land on a title. Meanwhile, though, the director has been careful to stress in interviews that the film isn’t actually a Manson biopic, so much as it is an examination of the conflicts and chaos of the year 1969. That being said, the Manson material is the only thing he’s revealed about the film so far, and the decision to plant the movie’s debut on the anniversary of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca’s deaths suggests that the Manson Family murders will be central—for good or ill—to the film’s marketing and plot.