Sylvester Stallone and Quentin Tarantino are teaming up to co-direct a six-part limited series set in the 1930s, shot entirely in black and white using period-authentic cameras from that era.
TMZ broke the story Friday morning.
No network or platform has been announced. No cast has been confirmed. What has been confirmed is the format and the premise. Gangsters, showgirls, boxing, and music, set in Depression-era America, shot the way films from that decade were actually shot.
Stallone will direct but will not appear on screen. Tarantino is writing and co-directing.
Why Are Stallone And Tarantino Working Together?
The collaboration sounds unexpected until you know the history between them, which goes back decades.
Tarantino has been publicly praising Stallone for most of his career. He has called Stallone a great actor and credited Rocky, the 1976 film Stallone wrote, directed, and starred in, as one of the movies that made him want to make films.
In his 2022 book Cinema Speculation, a collection of essays about the films that shaped him, Tarantino singled out Stallone’s 1978 directorial debut Paradise Alley, a Hell’s Kitchen story about three brothers trying to escape poverty through wrestling, and described it as the purest expression of a particular vision.
That is high praise from someone who is selective about what he considers a pure vision, and it was directed at a film most people have never seen.
Stallone, for his part, has a complicated history with Tarantino’s projects. Tarantino offered him roles twice, once in Jackie Brown in 1997 and once in Death Proof in 2007, and Stallone turned both down, citing creative differences with the parts.
They never got in a room together professionally. This series is the first time that changes.
What Stallone Brings To The 1930s
Stallone is 79. He has directed nine features across his career, including four Rocky films, Staying Alive, Nighthawks, The Expendables, and Rambo IV.
His directorial work has been largely dismissed by critics and largely ignored in discussions of his legacy, which has always centered on his performances.
What gets overlooked is that Paradise Alley, the film Tarantino singled out, came out the same year as F.I.S.T. and two years after Rocky, when Stallone was one of the most famous people in the world and chose to spend that capital making a black-and-white-inflected period piece about working class men in 1940s New York.
He also has direct experience with the era the series is set in. He played Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s real-life enforcer, in the 2020 film Capone, set in the early 1930s.
He knows the period, the aesthetic, and the criminal hierarchy of the time.
Why Is Quentin Tarantino Doing This?
Tarantino announced in 2022 that he intended to make an eight-episode series at some point.
He has never elaborated on what it might be. Whether this is that project is not confirmed, but the timing and format make it the obvious candidate.
He has been keeping busy outside of film. He is already developing a stage play set to premiere in London’s West End next year. His tenth and final film, the project he has said for years will be his last, has not materialized, and the series project appears to have taken priority.
Tarantino’s experience with period authenticity is well established: Inglourious Basterds was set partially in 1939, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood reconstructed 1969 Los Angeles in granular detail, and The Hateful Eight used 70mm Ultra Panavision to achieve a specific visual quality.
Shooting in black and white on 1930s cameras is an extension of that same instinct, the belief that period filmmaking requires period tools.
What We Know About The Series
Six episodes. Set in the 1930s. Black and white, shot on cameras from that decade.
Gangsters, showgirls, boxing, and music. Tarantino writes and co-directs. Stallone co-directs only, does not act. No network, no platform, no cast, no premiere date announced.
The absence of a platform announcement at this stage suggests the project is still in early development, being written before being sold, or already sold somewhere with the announcement being held.
That is consistent with how Tarantino works. He does not announce projects speculatively. If this has been confirmed to TMZ by sources with direct knowledge, it is happening.
What it will look like is easier to imagine than most pitches. The 1930s were the golden age of the American gangster film, The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, Scarface (the original), White Heat.
They were made in black and white because there was no other option, and that constraint produced a visual language, high contrast shadows, rain-slicked streets, faces lit like portraits, that has never quite been replicated in color.
Tarantino making a gangster series is not a surprise. Making it look like the films that invented the genre is.
