Quentin Tarantino confirmed long ago that his movies exist across two distinct, shared worlds. While they aren’t always easy to decipher, eagle-eyed fans have plucked out a fair few, and Tarantino himself has explained some of them. These two worlds are often referred to as the “Realer-Than-Real” Universe (where characters live their everyday yet chaotic lives) and the “Movie-Movie” Universe (the films and TV shows the characters from the real universe indulge in).
While most Tarantino buffs know that Pulp Fiction‘s Vincent Vega and Reservoir Dogs‘ Mr. Blonde are brothers, and that almost every character smokes Red Apple cigarettes, the Tarantino-Verse goes way deeper than that. QT masterfully links his films through family relations, recurring in-universe brands, and shared characters. Sometimes these are obvious, sometimes they are blink-and-you-miss-it. So, let’s break down the best ones.
The Multi-Generational Family Trees
By establishing long-spanning ancestral bloodlines, Quentin Tarantino slickly binds his films together, from his period pieces to his modern-day films. Most notably, in Pulp Fiction, Christopher Walken delivers a powerful monologue about a gold watch passed down through generations, eventually kept safe in a Vietnamese POW camp by his character Captain Koons. In Django Unchained, we learn that Koons comes from a long line of outlaws when one of the bounties on Dr. King Schultz’s list is “Crazy” Craig Koons, a member of the Smitty Bacall gang.
In Tarantino’s Oscar-winning slice of World War II revisionist history, Inglourious Basterds, Michael Fassbender plays Lt. Archie Hicox, the British film critic turned undercover operative. Jump forward to Tarantino’s second Western The Hateful Eight, and Tim Roth plays the elegantly speaking executioner, Pete Hicox (under the alias Oswaldo Mobray). This means that Pete is canonically the great-great-grandfather of Archie.
Many also believe that Inglourious Basterds ties into Tarantino’s 1993-scribed crime thriller True Romance. Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) is famously known as the Nazi-clubbing “Bear Jew.” Decades later in the Tarantino-Verse, True Romance introduces us to Lee Donowitz (Saul Rubinek), a wealthy, cocaine-fiend of a movie producer. The theory is that Lee is Donny’s son – meaning the Bear Jew’s theater assassination of Adolf Hitler essentially funded his son’s future Hollywood career. This would mean that True Romance is set in a world where Hitler was assassinated rather than taking his own life.
The ‘Kill Bill’ and ‘Django Unchained’ Connection You May Have Missed
A fan theory has long swirled that Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is connected to Django Unchained. If you look closely, it actually holds some water. Because Kill Bill is a hyper-stylized kung-fu revenge flick, it explicitly belongs to the “Movie-Movie” Universe. To explain that a little better, this technically means Jules and Vincent could buy a ticket to watch it in 1994. However, Tarantino dropped a massive anchor connecting it to his historical reality.
When The Bride (Uma Thurman) is buried alive by Budd (Michael Madsen) in Kill Bill: Vol. 2, she is thrown into an old, weathered grave. The name on the tombstone, Paula Schultz, seemed completely random at first, until Django Unchained dropped in movie theaters eight years later. Canonically, Paula is the deceased wife of Dr. King Schultz, the iconic bounty hunter from Django Unchained. To diehard Tarantino fans, this indicates that the real-life historical events of Django Unchained are so legendary in the “Realer-Than-Real” world that Hollywood producers eventually made a movie based on them, which is why Paula Schultz’s grave exists inside the fictional landscape of Kill Bill.
Jimmie’s Connection to Reservoir Dogs
As well as writing and directing both movies, Tarantino starred in small roles in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. While he played separate characters in each movie, his role in Pulp Fiction has a connection to Reservoir Dogs that got lost in the editing room. In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino cameos as Jimmie Dimmick, a guy utterly terrified that his wife Bonnie (Venessia Valentino) will come home from her night shift as a nurse and discover a headless body in his garage.
This isn’t the first time Bonnie is mentioned in the Tarantino-Verse. In a deleted scene from Reservoir Dogs, Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn) is on the phone scrambling to find medical help for the bleeding Mr. Orange (Tim Roth). He mentions that they can’t go to a hospital, but explains how he knows a reliable, discrete nurse named Bonnie who has helped the gang out in the past. This means that Jimmie’s wife is actually an under-the-table nurse who moonlights for the Los Angeles criminal underworld.
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