When news of a new David Fincher/Brad Pitt movie surfaced on Tuesday, a lot of people reacted with the assumption that it was a joke. Yes, it was April Fool’s Day, a dubious holiday that has taught anyone reading the internet to take the whole thing with several grains of salt until the calendar safely turns to April 2nd. (Would that such healthy skepticism about sketchy internet-sourced information was more pervasive in day-to-day life.) But most April Fool’s News takes the tenor of material designed to make you sigh with relief upon realizing it isn’t real. This, by contrast, was more of a dream-team fantasy: David Fincher would reteam with three-time collaborator Pitt on a sort-of sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, following Pitt’s Cliff Booth (the role for which he won an Oscar) years later – with a script by none other than Quentin Tarantino. Yes, the project once titled The Movie Critic that Tarantino had slated to be his final film as writer/director before scrapping it has been resurrected with Fincher helming it, freeing Tarantino to work on a play and a different film script.

What made it feel like a joke was that the whole thing is happening at the behest of Netflix.

Though Tarantino has done some odd little sorta-projects with the world’s biggest streaming service – there’s an expanded miniseries version of The Hateful Eight just hanging out there – and he obviously has respect for television (hell, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is as obsessed with TV production as film work), it seems fairly clear that he would never make a movie purely for streaming audiences. He’s spoken of wanting to get out of the film business in part because he doesn’t want to make glorified TV movies. Fincher, though, has a deal with Netflix, and this movie, if made, will net Tarantino a payday and (maybe?) produce a good movie, all without him having to worry about making his much-vaunted tenth-and-final film a sequel (or a TV movie). He won’t make a Tarantino movie for Netflix, but someone else can.

While most filmmakers are not quite as vociferous (or fussy) as Tarantino in this regard, it does seem like the Netflix roster has diminished substantially in recent years. For about a five-year period, they seemed to be grabbing everyone, signing checks for dream projects from Fincher, Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, Noah Baumbach, Jane Campion, Alfonso Cuarón, Jeremy Saulnier, Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, and Charlie Kaufman, among others. But whether feeling burned by the streamer’s steadfast disinterest in theatrical releases (they promised The Irishman a wide release; it went out on 250 screens), courted by competing streamers (Scorsese, Lee, and Joel Coen have all done subsequent projects for Apple), or less enticed by the company’s more-blockbusters edicts, Netflix doesn’t have quite so many marquee filmmakers on the hook these days.

Baumbach is still there, which makes sense; his movies are (usually) inexpensive and (sometimes) involve Netflix mainstay Adam Sandler. But Fincher may be their biggest prestige filmmaker at the moment. On one hand, it makes sense; Fincher hasn’t ever made a real franchise movie, and he favors the kind of darker-toned, adult-oriented material with high production values that makes big studios real itchy about cutting a check. On the other, Fincher also feels like he’s lost some cache with the film-geek crowd in his Netflix years. Despite some Oscar nominations and wins, Mank was dismissed by plenty of critics. The Killer, Fincher’s most recent film, is one of his best ever; I was fortunate enough to catch a theatrical screening, so I can attest to the fact that it plays way better on the big screen, which is how almost none of its audience experienced it. So yeah, Fincher can make a movie that’s sharper and more sophisticated than Panic Room or Seven, but it doesn’t much matter if people experience it as… hey, kind of a TV movie. Meanwhile, Seven had a successful IMAX re-release this winter, almost certainly attended by some folks who haven’t watched one or both of Fincher’s Netflix entries.

There’s a vast difference between Fincher (or Campion, or Baumbach, and so on) and a Lindsay Lohan Christmas rom-com, but the current Netflix strategy under film chief Dan Lin only makes that distinction through if-you-know-you-know gestures, like putting out their more prestigious movies in barely-advertised Oscar-qualifying theatrical runs in major cities. Sometimes, they flourish anyway; Emilia Pérez played at the IFC Center in Manhattan for a full third of a year, well after it dropped on Netflix. But the company also apparently requires fierce negotiations for deals that feel like no-brainers (e.g., allowing Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia movie to play in IMAX for several weeks before it hits the streamer). Prestige branding is apparently just another tile in the Netflix library of content; it’s also a way to keep interesting movies out of theaters, where they might entice subscribers out of their homes. This new project may be a way for Tarantino to save some face after laboring over a screenplay he spooked himself out of directing. But it’s also a major test to see if a David Fincher movie can feel like an event again, without movie theaters involved.  

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.