Quentin Tarantino In Talks To Direct “Justified” Revival

FX’s Justified is one of the most well-regarded series to come out of the cable outlet and the recent announcement of a revival series, subtitled City Primeval got many excited. Things are going to another level, now, though, as celebrated director Quentin Tarantino is reportedly in talks to helm some of the episodes in the revival.

This is particularly interesting because Tarantino has been on a well-publicized break, as he has famously promised that his next film will be his last directorial effort. He has been working on his writing, recently, as well as helping to develop a failed Star Trek movie.

The revival will see Timothy Olyphant reprising his iconic role of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens which he played for the entirety of the show’s original run. All six seasons were highly acclaimed and regularly had high ratings for FX from 2009-2015. It was regularly an awards contender, winning in several categories and being a mainstay at the Emmy’s and the Golden Globes.

The revival is going to pick up the story in conventional time, progressing eight years with Givens now settled in Miami. He’s still a marshal, but now he also a father to a fourteen-year-old girl. He’ll have to figure out how to balance his new parenting responsibilities with his law enforcement career. However, a random encounter on a Florida highway sends him to Detroit, where he crosses paths with a violent sociopath, Clement Mansell (aka The Oklahoma Wildman), who had been successfully eluding Detroit’s finest ad Givens finds himself in the hunt, as well.

Olyphant and Tarantino have a history together, as they recently worked together in the filmmaker’s most recent film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Notably, Justified is an adaptation of one of Elmore Leonard’s works, which is something that Tarantino is well-versed in, as his picture Jackie Brown comes from the same author. The revival is adapting Leonard’s 1980 novel “City Primeval”, with Olyphant’s Givens replacing the original story’s main character.

How many episodes Tarantino is set to direct is currently up in the air, though it is expected to be a multiple-episode arc. And in addition to starring in Justified: City Primeval, Olyphant will act as executive producer alongside showrunners and writers Dave Andron and Michael Dinner and original series creator Graham Yost. There is still no release date scheduled for the project, though it is likely to not be until sometime in late 2023.