How Quentin Tarantino's Hateful Eight links to Inglourious Basterds

Long before Marvel started stringing together blockbusters in its shared cinematic universe, Quentin Tarantino was weaving his own interconnected web of movies.

Eagle-eyed viewers have long noticed that the director’s films are sprinkled with character connections, recurring brands, self-referential jokes, and other subtle clues that they’re all somehow related. And according to one of Tarantino’s frequent collaborators, his new film The Hateful Eight is no exception.

Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction) plays Oswaldo “The Little Man” Mobray in the post-Civil War western, and the actor recently told the Huffington Post that the character is linked to someone from another Tarantino film.

“I won’t say which one,” Roth said. “He’s the great-great-grandfather of one of the characters in Inglourious Basterds.”

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As the Huffington Post points out, Mobray’s nickname seems to be a major clue, as it’s shared by B.J. Novak’s character in Basterds, Smithson “The Little Man” Utivich. Coincidence? Time will tell.

Speaking of Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino was recently asked by Indiewire whether he might revisit the alternate-history revenge fantasy with a sequel or spinoff — something he has discussed in the past, with the potential title Black Crows.

“Who knows, I could still [make] that,” Tarantino said. “The thing is, the huge stuff that I took out [of the original Inglourious Basterds script] could make its own movie, following a platoon of black troops that were court-martialed and they escape. They are in France, they are going to be hung in London and their whole thing is to get to Switzerland. And they end up getting into an adventure and they meet the Basterds, so I ended up taking all that out.”

He added, “I could still do that. I’m not done with it. It’s the closest thing that I have which is a big piece of material that hasn’t been done before. And I would still need to end it and re-look at the whole thing again, but that could happen.”

In the meantime, The Hateful Eight opens Christmas Day in select theaters, with a wide release following Jan. 1.