The Bride Sheds New Blood in First Trailer for Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair

Director Quentin Tarantino can never be said to lack for ambition, which was never more apparent than when he originally drafted 2003 action/kung fu revenge opus Kill Bill thinking that it would be a single feature film. Suffice to say, no studio, and no audience, was going to allow themselves to be subjected to more than four hours of QT’s Hong Kong martial arts tribute … at least not at the time. This was no doubt the right call; look no further than the tepid box office of Grindhouse a few years later for evidence of wavering attention spans. Split into Volume 1 and Volume 2, Kill Bill became a seminal entry in Tarantino’s auteur filmography, and a huge starring role for Uma Thurman. But film geeks have always been left imagining what that combined version that Tarantino envisioned might actually look like, and now we’ll finally get a chance to theatrically experience the film that way, thanks to the upcoming theater release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, the first trailer for which you can see below. It hits theaters in limited release on Dec. 5, 2025.

The Whole Bloody Affair presents the entirety of Kill Bill as one film, although some of the finer points of what this means aren’t immediately clear. We are assuming, for instance, that the film hasn’t been reedited in any substantial way to reorder any of its scenes that could theoretically float from Vol. 1 to Vol. 2. It has been given a (very necessary) 15 minute intermission, which brings the full runtime of the theatrical experience up to 281 minutes. Presumably, that intermission will simply happen where the credits rolled on Vol. 1.

Generating considerably more interest and anticipation, meanwhile, is the promise of some new footage and some tweaks to the version of Kill Bill that we’ve long known. The Whole Bloody Affair adds in a long-lost anime sequence that seems to provide backstory for O-Ren Ishii’s iconic teenage bodyguard Gogo Yubari, in an art style similar to the anime backstory that already existed in the film for O-Ren. Viewers who saw the original theatrical release of Kill Bill in Japan have reported that some of this Gogo Yubari animated sequence may have screened in theaters in Japan back in 2003, but other portions look to be entirely new to any and all viewers. At the very least, most viewers will have never seen this sequence. There are also other notable changes that we can see in the trailer below, the most immediately noticeable of which is that the huge fight/massacre sequence of The Bride vs. The Crazy 88 is now presented in full color, rather than in black and white, which should massively highlight the level of gore and blood that is present. This sequence was not originally conceived in B&W, but was more of a compromise with the MPAA for Tarantino, to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating. One wonders what other stylistic tweaks might be present here as well, or when the opening narration of the trailer was recorded with David Carradine, considering that he passed away in 2009. If they recreated his voice with A.I., then clearly we riot.

Check out the first trailer for Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair below.

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