23 Jan – More than a week after it was announced that Quentin Tarantino's next film would be a Western titled "The Hateful Eight", the director has declared that he will be shelving the project indefinitely, as the copy of the script's first draft has been leaked. According to Collider, the director of "Django Unchained" is distraught over the script's leak as he only gave it to the six people he could trust. "I'm very, very depressed. I finished a script, a first draft, and I didn't mean to shoot it until next winter, a year from now. I gave it to six people, and apparently it's gotten out today... I gave it to one of the producers on "Django Unchained", Reggie Hudlin, and he let an agent come to his house and read it. That's a betrayal, but not crippling because the agent didn't end up with the script. There is an ugly maliciousness to the rest of it. I gave it to three actors: Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth. The one I know didn't do this is Tim Roth. One of the others let their agent read it and that agent has now passed it on to everyone in Hollywood. I don't know how these f*****g agents work, but I'm not making this next. I'm going to publish it, and that's it for now. I give it out to six people and if I can't trust them to that degree, then I have no desire to make it. I'll publish it. I'm done. I'll move on to the next thing. I've got ten more where that came from."
While it is still not yet known who was it that leaked the first draft of Tarantino's work-in-progress, the director is set on hunting down the person and has asked people to "name names". The title "The Hateful Eight" is a play on the classic Western "The Magnificent Seven" and the former was also to be an ensemble Western film. Following Tarantino's outburst, his next film may instead be a prison movie inspired by the Robert Blake case. Tarantino may not be directing the film anytime soon, but fans can read the story in book form as he is considering publishing it.