Quentin Tarantino Intends to Direct ‘Bounty Law’ TV Series, Won’t Direct Star Trek

Quentin Tarantino may be nearing the end of his film career, but the director is making a quick stop off in TV land before he does. He told Deadline that he intends to direct a limited-run TV series based on the fictitious show Bounty Law from his Oscar-nominated film, Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. The director had written the five episodes as part of developing Once Upon a Time, but this is the first word of his actually turning them into a TV series.

Tarantino said the following:

As far as the Bounty Law shows, I want to do that, but it will take me a year and a half. It got an introduction from Once Upon a (Time) in Hollywood, but I don’t really consider it part of that movie even though it is. This is not about Rick Dalton playing Jake Cahill. It’s about Jake Cahill. Where all this came from was, I ended up watching a bunch of Wanted, Dead or Alive, and The Rifleman, and Tales of Wells Fargo, these half-hour shows to get in the mindset of Bounty Law, the kind of show Rick was on. I’d liked them before, but I got really into them. The concept of telling a dramatic story in half an hour. You watch and think, wow, there’s a helluva lot of storytelling going on in 22 minutes. I thought, I wonder if I can do that? I ended up writing five half-hour episodes. So I’ll do them, and I will direct all of them.

It’s not clear how these episodes will be released if they ever actually are, but a Tarantino series would probably start quite the bidding war among the major streamers for the rights. The show would presumably play like the classic Westerns Tarantino references and most likely simply be a straightforward Western with nods to the genre — and a lot more gore and blood. Presumably, both Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt would be asked to reprise their roles, but who knows if they would?

In the same interview, the director put the final kibosh on the chances that he’d be directing a new Star Trek film that he developed alongside The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith, though he may still have a role in making it. “I think they might make that movie, but I just don’t think I’m going to direct it,” said Tarantino. “It’s a good idea. They should definitely do it and I’ll be happy to come in and give them some notes on the first rough cut.”