The whimsical battlegrounds of Fortnite will serve as the unlikely setting for a never-before-seen story starring Uma Thurman’s The Bride from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill universe. Before the martial arts saga returns to theaters as a single, unrated epic dubbed Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, the battle-royale video game will bring The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge to life as an animated short built in Unreal Engine.
“Bringing this into Fortnite sounded cool and felt like a wonderful fit for the game world and the characters,” Quentin Tarantino said of the 8-minute short, which he directed. “I was waiting for when the time was right, and Fortnite was right—something cinematic inside a much bigger world.”
At his Vista Theater in Los Angeles at a special launch event, Tarantino elaborate on the how the project came to life through a collaboration with Epic Games, Fortnite‘s developer.
“They got together with me to talk about some situation where my characters and Fortnite do something kind of groovy,” Tarantino said, according to Variety. “So I show up at the meeting thinking that we’re just going to talk about that they want to license the characters, and they want to get my ideas about what will be a fun thing to do.”
After the Epic Games team inquired about opportunities beyond licensing deals, Tarantino revealed that there was an entire Kill Bill chapter that “never made second drafts,” involving a twin sister to Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama).
“It was too crazy, too violent, and just too much action,” Tarantino said. Regardless, he sent the script to Epic Games.
“I actually thought maybe the ship had sailed as far as like doing new material. I was wrong.” He added, “When I wrote the first draft of the script, there was a lost chapter that, frankly, I just didn’t think we could pull off. And Yuki has been a figment of my imagination for over 20 years.”
Thurman also made an appearance alongside Tarantino to explain how the team used motion capture to render and animate The Bride for a new audience.
“It’s so novel to wear the camera on your head, but I completely forgot about it; I just started to live in the moments of the scenes we were doing. This is a new audience for the movie. It’s really moving. It’s really great, and I think it’s something meant to be.”
Tarantino added, “I want both the Kill Bill fan and the Fortnite fan to be totally effing happy about this collaboration.”
Watch the premiere of The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge in Fortnite before it hits theaters in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom on December 5 as part of the exclusive limited theatrical run of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.
