Quentin Tarantino Says 'Inglourious Basterds' Spin-Off 'Killer Crow' Could Finish His Revisionist History Trilogy

Quentin Tarantino's two most recent films, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, play with a blend of established history and fantasy in ways unlike the stories told in his previous movies. Basterds warps history by killing Hitler and most of the Nazi command long before the real end of the war, and Django allows one freed American slave the sort of vengeance that was never won by slaves in reality.

Tarantino has suggested in the recent past that there might be a third film to complete his loose trilogy of films that toy with history. He has also spoken of a storyline cut from Basterds, without going into too much detail. Now, a new interview has very specific statements about a movie that could be "the third of the trilogy." This one could be called Killer Crow, and it "would be [connected to] Inglourious Basterds, too, because Inglourious Basterds are in it," but it would follow a squad of black US soldiers in 1944. 

Speaking to Henry Louis Gates Jr. at The Root (via Movieline) Tarantino gives a revealing interview, and explains that he might follow his two recent films with a third featuring the same historical bent:

I don't know exactly when I'm going to do it, but there's something about this that would suggest a trilogy. My original idea for Inglourious Basterds way back when was that this [would be] a huge story that included the [smaller] story that you saw in the film, but also followed a bunch of black troops, and they had been f–ked over by the American military and kind of go apes–t. They basically — the way Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and the Basterds are having an "Apache resistance" — [the] black troops go on an Apache warpath and kill a bunch of white soldiers and white officers on a military base and are just making a warpath to Switzerland.

So that was always going to be part of it. And I was going to do it as a miniseries, and that was going to be one of the big storylines. When I decided to try to turn it into a movie, that was a section I had to take out to help tame my material. I have most of that written. It's ready to go; I just have to write the second half of it.

He says this would be set in '44, after the invasion of Normandy.

Looking back to statements made before Basterds was scripted and shot, the director said in '07,

I want to explore something that really hasn't been done... I want to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to.

That's exactly what he's tried to do with his two films made since that statement. Killer Crow would follow up on that brief talk of excised Basterds subplots and potentially combine approach of the two films preceding it. Keep in mind that Tarantino has always liked to talk about potential spin-offs and sequels that never materialize, but he does seem to be getting more focused lately, and this could be an idea that actually gets to the screen.