Quentin Tarantino Should Do a Kill Bill Prequel

After dispatching Vernita Green a.k.a. Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox) early in the first Kill Bill, the Bride Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman) comes face-to-face with her enemy’s young daughter Nikkia (Ambrosia Kelley). “You can take my word for it, your mother had it coming,” Beatrix tells the girl. “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.”

For years, that exchange has had people waiting for Kill Bill: Volume III, in which the adult Nikkia comes for her revenge. While Quentin Tarantino did toss around the idea of part three, lately he’s been thinking about looking to the story’s past instead of its future. “I had a whole Kill Bill idea in my mind when we were doing it, and then I was so wiped out from doing the movie,” Tarantino recently said (via EW). “I like the idea of a Bill origin. A story of Bill, about how Bill became Bill and the three godfathers that made Bill: Esteban Vihaio, Pai Mei, and Hattori Hanzō.”

In most cases, it’s a bad sign when a filmmaker goes back to their old work instead of forging ahead, but this is a special circumstance. First of all, Tarantino has always been an allusive filmmaker, who fills his films with references to other works. See, for example, the aforementioned Hattori Hanzō, who takes his name from the mythical figure and the character from martial arts movies that Tarantino loved as a kid. It’s fitting that Tarantino would reference himself, especially if he can do it with the same level of skill and spectacle he brings to pastiches of other works.

Second, Kill Bill is suited toward the type of expansion that an origin story would entail. Bill was an elusive figure in the first two movies, kept off screen until late in the second film, existing only as an unseen man in flashbacks or the subject of conversation. There’s much about Bill that we don’t know and could make for an interesting story. And the episodic nature of the movies invites flashbacks just as much as it invites the aforementioned Kill Bill: Volume 3.

Perhaps the best reason for Tarantino to do a Kill Bill prequel is that it would force him to reconsider his arbitrary 10 movie rule. As every cinephile knows and laments, Tarantino has claimed that he would only make 10 movies before retiring, for fear of continuing past his prime. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is movie number nine, which means the next one will be his last.

Several possible 10th films have been pitched including, most infamously, a Star Trek film that riffs on the Original Series gangster episode “A Piece of the Action.” But for a long time, Tarantino has said that his last film would be The Movie Critic. Set in the 1970s, The Movie Critic would have focused on a writer for a pornographic magazine and would have likely involved some of the revisionist history he brought to Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

Originally slated for a 2025 release, The Movie Critic failed to materialize. While that means we don’t get to enjoy a new Tarantino movie this year, it also means that the director has to rethink his strategy—and possibly rethink his 10 movie rule at the same time.

Or will he? We know that he’s making a sequel to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, with Brad Pitt returning as stunt man Cliff Booth. But while the film, tentatively titled The Adventures of Cliff Booth, will have a Tarantino script, he’s turned directing duties to another top-level talent, David Fincher. Perhaps another filmmaker will be the one to bring the Kill Bill origin film to fruition.

Or maybe it won’t be a movie at all. After all, Tarantino’s comments about the origin film came during a screening of “Yuki’s Revenge,” a short film that he wrote and directed, and which stars Uma Thurman as the Bride, created entirely within Fortnite. One would assume that “Yuki’s Revenge,” developed on a script fragment from the original movie, was just part of the promotional cycle for Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair—the film that combines both parts of Kill Bill and adds a new section—which releases this week. But the event clearly has Tarantino thinking about more stories he can tell.

Stories he can tell… eventually. “I’ve got other things to do right now,” he admitted when talking about the prequel, and he ended his discussion by asking, “Will I live long enough to do that? That remains to be seen.”

But if he decides to do a Kill Bill prequel, or if he decides that Kill Bill: Volume 3 is the way to go, we’ll be waiting, just like Beatrix Kiddo waits for Nikkia Green.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair releases in theaters on December 5, 2025.