The Whole Bloody Affair’ Gets Theatrical Release

For the first time, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill will play in theaters as the director originally intended.

The film was famously split into two parts by its original distributor, Miramax (and its executive producer, Harvey Weinstein), who asked Tarantino to break the movie into two halves to avoid having to shorten the film from its projected four-hour runtime. Tarantino agreed, and the two parts, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Kill Bill: Vol. 2, were released in theaters in the fall of 2003 and the spring of 2004.

Tarantino has very rarely shown the complete four-hour version of the film in the past — which is called Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. It played at the Cannes Film Festival and has also screened at the director’s theater, The Vista, in Los Angeles. But now Tarantino is releasing The Whole Bloody Affair into a whole bunch of theaters, where it will be shown in both 35mm and 70mm.

Tarantino’s statement on the news…

I wrote and directed it as one movie — and I’m so glad to give the fans the chance to see it as one movie. The best way to see Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is at a movie theater in glorious 70mm or 35mm. Blood and guts on a big screen in all its glory!

READ MORE: Every Quentin Tarantino Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best

Both films star Uma Thurman as the Bride, a deadly assassin who is turned on by her employer (that’d be Bill, played by David Carradine) but survives his attempt to kill her. When she recovers from her injuries, she swears revenge against him and the rest of her former team of killers, and begins picking them off one by one.

Miramax’s decision to split the film was a smart one, at least from a financial perspective. They got twice as many ticket sales (and later DVD sales) on one Tarantino production. Vol. 1 grossed over $180 million and Vol. 2 earned another $153 million. Tarantino’s combined version trims out the cliffhanger that previously concluded Vol. 1, along with some of the opening from Vol. 2. But it adds in an animated sequence that was cut from the film during production and never appeared in either version when it was two separate films.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair will premiere in theaters on December 5.