Quentin Tarantino’s fourth film, Kill Bill, was famously so long that it was split into two separate movies: Kill Bill Volume 1 and its sequel, Volume 2, released about half a year apart back in the early aughts. Soon, it’ll celebrate a re-release, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which stitches the movies back together and adds new scenes, too. But even a movie of its length has scenes left on the cutting room floor. Using Epic’s Unreal Engine, Tarantino is closing a chapter of his career that’s been more than 20 years in the making.
Totally separate from the new scenes found within The Whole Bloody Affair, The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge is a roughly 10-minute scene built in Unreal Engine that brings together the Kill Bill series and, unexpectedly–or perhaps not–Fortnite. I recently attended the premiere of Yuki’s Revenge at the packed Vista Theater in Los Angeles, alongside Tarantino and “The Bride” herself, Uma Thurman, who were on hand to debut this long-lost scene now that it’s found its surprising home.
The scene, Tarantino explained after the showing, was always considered by him to have happened in the canon of the Kill Bill story. “The audience just didn’t see it,” he explained, as it wasn’t feasible at that time for the cast and crew to film what is essentially another bloody fight scene in a movie already full of them. Its absence was known to film buffs and fans of the director going back years, with many wishing it had made it into the movie originally.
Tarantino explained how Epic approached him ahead of Fortnite Chapter 7, interested to learn if he had any story ideas that they could produce together for the West Coast- and Hollywood-themed season, Pacific Break. Always looking to make a splash–for last year’s big beat, Snoop Dogg and Ice Spice played a surprise concert in Times Square–Epic wanted to roll out something from the famous director to promote Fortnite’s new chapter, which will presumably span the next year if tradition holds.
As it so happens, Tarantino revealed to the developer-publisher that he’d been sitting on a scene he’d dearly missed for 20+ years. The timing seemed impeccable. Epic would get its next big thing. Tarantino would close the book on something that he’d probably given up on making years ago. And so, somehow, Fortnite–where nothing really feels impossible anymore–is now home to a never-before-seen lost chapter from Quentin Tarantino’s filmography.
Uma Thurman returned to provide voice and face capture for her starring role, and the vignette plays out much like the rest of the movie, but it’s where it’s not so faithful that I find it most interesting. Fortnite doesn’t depict blood, so neither does Yuki’s Revenge. There’s also, naturally, a distinct lack of swear words that comes off as uncanny in a Tarantino-involved production. In the chapter’s funniest recurring bit, characters other than The Bride and Yuki are depicted by Fortnite originals, like Peely, the bipedal banana and Skull Trooper, who spectates with a big bucket of popcorn in his lap while Kill Bill’s violent femmes kick up dust in the streets.
The end result makes for a peculiar crossover, but one that illustrates Fortnite’s unprecedented staying power. Epic has plans to grow Fortnite well beyond being the “battle royale” game, and we see these plans come to fruition on the perpetual treadmill of updates in the game, as the studio continues to rebuild Fortnite like the Ship of Theseus.
Things like Fortnite Festival and Creative mode illustrate this to a certain audience–those already logging in to play video games. But as the studio continues exploring what “Fortnite” even means, not just today, but 10 years from now, this lost chapter from Kill Bill provides another vantage point into that future. Fortnite can be a battle royale game. It can be Counter-Strike. It can be Rock Band, or Minecraft, or Mario Kart. It can be an Ariana Grande concert. It can be a 20-year-in-the-making lost chapter from Kill Bill, too. What is Fortnite? Increasingly, Fortnite is whatever it wants to be.
Yuki’s Revenge debuts in Fortnite on November 30.
