Quentin Tarantino is considering adapting Forty Lashes Less One for TV

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

With THE HATEFUL EIGHT ready to drop into theaters, Quentin Tarantino can now turn his attention to future projects, and during a conversation with Premiere, the director revealed that one of them might be a small screen take on the Elmore Leonard novel Forty Lashes Less One.

It always takes me a while before thinking about the future. That said, I own the rights to this book I've wanted to adapt for a while, and the time may have come for me to tackle it. This is Forty Lashes Less One, by Elmore Leonard… which could be my third Western. I'm considering taking the project to TV, in the form of a mini-series of four or six hours.

Here's the book description from Amazon:

The hell called Yuma Prison can destroy the soul of any man. And it's worse for those whose damning crime is the color of their skin. The law says Chiricahua Apache Raymond San Carlos and black-as-night former soldier Harold Jackson are murderers, and they'll stay behind bars until they're dead and rotting. But even in the worst place on Earth, there's hope. And for two hard and hated inmates — first enemies, then allies by necessity — it waits at the end of a mad and violent contest … on a bloody trail that winds toward Arizona's five most dangerous men.

While I'm all for a TV version of Forty Lashes Less One, I have a hard time believing it's going to get made, especially with the way Tarantino likes to talk up potential projects that never move past the "I'd love to [blank]" stage. We'll have to wait and see just how serious he is about doing adapting Leonard's book for television, but I for one hope a miniseries does actually happen.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT will be released on December 25, 2015 as a roadshow presentation in 70 mm film before hitting digital theaters on January 8, 2016.