Tarantino rips Disney over Star Wars: 'It's vindictive, it's mean and it's extortion'

Quentin Tarantino had some choice words for Disney on Wednesday morning when he visited The Howard Stern Show to talk about his upcoming movie, The Hateful Eight.

The director went on quite a lengthy rant about the mistreatment he and his movie were receiving from the studio after they were forced out of Los Angeles' famous Cinerama Dome so Star Wars could play the entire holiday season.

According to Tarantino, the original deal was that The Hateful Eight would be allocated two weeks of exclusive screen time starting on Christmas Day, which makes sense considering the Cinerama Dome is one of the few theaters in L.A. that's already set up to project 70mm films.

Star Wars, meanwhile, would get the week before Christmas to play exclusively at the theater, but that all changed when Disney reportedly threatened to pull its movie from the theater entirely unless they broke their contract with The Weinstein Company over The Hateful Eight. This would allow Disney to have exclusive rights to all the screens at the theater to showcase The Force Awakens during the holiday season.

"They've got the biggest movie in the world," Tarantino, who sounded extremely upset, told Stern. "We're talking about one effing theater ... they are going out of their way to fuck me."

Stern said that many people at Disney, including president Bob Iger and director J.J. Abrams, were devout listeners of his program and offered to reach out to them on behalf of Tarantino to try and figure the entire situation out.

"It's vindictive, it's mean and it's extortion," Tarantino said in response. "They literally threatened the Arclight."

Tarantino added that he wasn't sure why Disney was so hellbent on removing The Hateful Eight from that one theater — specially with another theater less than a mile away playing the movie — when none of the films coming out this month aren't any "serious competition to Star Wars."

Polygon has reached out to Disney for comment on this story. Listen to this part of the interview segment below.