| Kill Bill: Volume 2 | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Quentin Tarantino |
| Written by | Quentin Tarantino |
| Produced by | Lawrence Bender |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Robert Richardson |
| Edited by | Sally Menke |
| Music by | |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Miramax Films |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 138 minutes |
| Country | United States[2] |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $30 million[3] |
| Box office | $153.3 million[3] |
Kill Bill: Volume 2 is a 2004 Americanmartial artsaction film written and directed byQuentin Tarantino. It starsUma Thurman as theBride, who continues her campaign of revenge against the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (Daryl Hannah,Vivica A. Fox,Lucy Liu, andMichael Madsen) and their leader Bill (David Carradine), who tried to kill her and their unborn child.
Tarantino conceivedKill Bill as an homage to low-budget cinema, includingexploitation films, martial arts films,samurai cinema,blaxploitation andspaghetti westerns.Volume 2 is the second of twoKill Bill films produced simultaneously; the first,Volume 1, was released six months earlier. The films were set for a single release, but the film, with a runtime of over four hours, was divided in two.
Volume 2 received positive reviews and grossed $152.2 million worldwide on a production budget of $30 million. Tarantino had planned to make furtherKill Bill films in the following years, but abandoned those plans by 2023. Like its predecessor,Volume 2 is listed as one of the greatest martial arts films of all time and one of the best kung fu sequels of all time. A single film combining both parts,Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, is scheduled for release on December 5, 2025.
The pregnantBride and her groom rehearse their wedding. Bill − the Bride's former lover, and the leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad − arrives unexpectedly and orders the Deadly Vipers to kill everyone at the wedding rehearsal. Bill shoots the Bride in the head, but she survives and swears revenge.
Four years later, the Bride, having already assassinated Deadly Vipers O-Ren Ishii and Vernita Green, goes to the trailer of Bill's brother Budd, another Deadly Viper, planning to ambush him. Having been warned by Bill beforehand, he incapacitates her with a non-lethal shotgun blast of rock salt and sedates her. He calls Elle Driver, another former Deadly Viper, and arranges to sell her the Bride's sword for $1 million. He seals the Bride inside a coffin and buries her alive.
In a flashback to years earlier, Bill tells the young Bride of the legendarymartial arts master Pai Mei and his Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, adeath blow that Pai refuses to teach his students; properly used, the attack is reputed to leave an opponent able to take only five steps before dying. Bill takes the Bride to Pai's temple for training. Pai ridicules and torments her during training, but she eventually gains his respect. In the present, the Bride uses Pai's techniques to escape from the coffin and claw her way to the surface.
Elle arrives at Budd's trailer and kills him with ablack mamba hidden within the case full of money for the sword. She calls Bill and tells him that the Bride has killed Budd and that she has killed the Bride, using the Bride's real name: Beatrix Kiddo. As Elle exits the trailer, Beatrix ambushes her and they fight. Elle, who was also taught by Pai, taunts Beatrix by revealing that she killed Pai by poisoning his favorite meal in retribution for him plucking out her eye after she called him "a miserable old fool". Enraged, Beatrix plucks out Elle's remaining eye and leaves her screaming in the trailer with the black mamba.
InAcuña, Mexico, Beatrix meets a retired pimp, Esteban Vihaio, who helps her find Bill. She tracks him to his home, and discovers that their daughter B. B. is still alive, now four years old. Beatrix spends the evening with them. After she puts B. B. to bed, Bill shoots Beatrix with a dart containingtruth serum and interrogates her. She explains that she left the Deadly Vipers when she discovered she was pregnant, in order to give B. B. a better life. Bill explains that he assumed she was dead; he ordered her assassination when he discovered she was alive and engaged to a "jerk" he assumed was the father of her child. The two begin to fight, but Beatrix traps Bill's sword in herscabbard and strikes him with the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. Surprised that Pai taught her the attack, Bill reconciles with her, then falls dead as he walks away. Beatrix leaves with B. B. to start a new life.
TheKill Bill films were inspired byexploitation films that played incheap US theaters in the 1970s, includingmartial arts films,samurai cinema,blaxploitation films andspaghetti westerns.[5]Kill BillVolume 1 andVolume 2 were planned and produced as a single film.[6] After editing began, the executive producer,Harvey Weinstein, who was known for pressuring filmmakers to shorten their films, suggested that Quentin Tarantino split the film in two.[6] The decision was announced in July 2003.[6]
Tarantino said he saved most of the Bride's character development for the second film: "As far as the first half is concerned, I didn't want to make her sympathetic. I wanted to make her scary."[7] He said he "loves" the Bride and that he "killed himself to put her in a good place" for the ending.[8]
TheKill Bill: Volume 2 soundtrack includes tracks byShivaree,Ennio Morricone,Malcolm McLaren,Charlie Feathers,Meiko Kaji andLuis Bacalov.[9] The original score was composed by the filmmakerRobert Rodriguez and the producerRZA.[10]
Kill Bill: Volume 2 was released in theaters onApril 16, 2004. It was originally scheduled to be released onFebruary 20, 2004, but was rescheduled.Variety posited that the delay was to coincide its theatrical release withVolume 1's release on DVD.[11] In the United States and Canada,Volume 2 was released in2,971 theaters and grossed$25.1 million on its opening weekend,[3] ranking first at the box office and beating fellow openerThe Punisher.Volume 2's opening weekend gross was higher thanVolume 1's, and the equivalent success confirmed the studio's financial decision to split the film into two theatrical releases.[12]
Volume 2 attracted more female theatergoers thanVolume 1, with 60% of the audience being male and 56% of the audience being men between the ages of 18 and 29 years old.Volume 2's opening weekend was the largest to date forMiramax Films aside from releases under its armDimension Films. The opening weekend was also the largest to date in the month of April for a film restricted in the United States to theatergoers 17 years old and up, bestingLife's 1999 record.Volume 2's opening weekend was strengthened by the reception ofVolume 1 in the previous year among audiences and critics, abundant publicity related to the splitting into two volumes, and the DVD release ofVolume 1 in the week beforeVolume 2's theatrical release.[13]
Outside of the United States and Canada,Volume 2 was released in 20 territories over the weekend ofApril 23, 2004. It grossed an estimated$17.7 million and ranked first at the international box office, ending an eight-week streak held byThe Passion of the Christ.[14]Volume 2 grossed a total of$66.2 million in the United States and Canada and$86 million in other territories for a worldwide total of$152.2 million.[3]
In the United States,Volume 2 was released onDVD andVHS on August 10, 2004. In a December 2005 interview, Tarantino addressed the lack of a special edition DVD forKill Bill by stating "I've been holding off because I've been working on it for so long that I just wanted a year off fromKill Bill and then I'll do the big supplementary DVD package."[15] The United States does not have a DVD boxed set ofKill Bill, though box sets of the two separate volumes are available in other countries, such as France, Japan and the United Kingdom. Upon the DVD release ofVolume 2 in the US, however, Best Buy did offer an exclusive box set slipcase to house the two individual releases together.[16]
At the 2008Provincetown International Film Festival, Tarantino announced that the original cut ofKill Bill, incorporating both films and an extended animation sequence, would be released in May 2009 asKill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.[17] Screenings began on March 27, 2011, at Tarantino'sNew Beverly Cinema.[18]
In July 2014, Tarantino stated that he and the Weinstein Company planned forThe Whole Bloody Affair to have a limited theatrical release within the following year. This version of the film was set to include an extended anime sequence, which had been commissioned, financed, and produced byProduction I.G based on the original script without Tarantino's request.[19]The Whole Bloody Affair had a limited theatrical release from July 18 to July 28, 2025, at Tarantino'sVista Theater.[20] In August 2025, Tarantino revealed the reason as to why he hasn't given a full release ofThe Whole Bloody Affair, saying:
Basically, I didn't want to do anything with it until I owned it. I own it now, so I wanted to wait until the rights were completely all on me. I'm not waiting to put it out. I've got the print. I show it from time to time at the New Beverly. You can see it, it's there all right. Also, I love my old work, but I'm not all that about mining it and taking from it and spinning off from it. So I was going to do a zillion things withKill Bill, but then when I finished it, well, that was such a f–ing hard movie. Then I was, 'OK, I'm done with that for a little while.' But I wanted to own it. But also, I got to say, in this world that everything is available, and everything is for profit and everything is a chip to be sold on the market because everything is owned by corporations - that's not owned by a corporation, that's owned by me. And the fact that you have to come to my theater to see it, and it's not just sitting on a stack of DVDs and Blu-rays that you get around to watching eventually - the minute it becomes in your hand, it just means less".[21]
It is scheduled for a theatrical release byLionsgate in the United States on December 5, 2025.[22]
On review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes,Kill Bill: Volume 2 holds an approval rating of 84% based on 246 reviews, with an average rating of 7.80/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Kill Bill: Volume 2 adds extra plot and dialogue to the action-heavy exploits of its predecessor, while still managing to deliver a suitably hard-hitting sequel."[23] AtMetacritic, which assigns a weighted average score to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 83 out of 100 based on 41 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[24] Audiences polled byCinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale, a grade up from the "B+" earned by the previous film.[25]
Roger Ebert gave the film 4 stars out of 4, writing: "Put the two parts together, and Tarantino has made a masterful saga that celebrates the martial arts genre while kidding it, loving it, and transcending it. ... This is all one film, and now that we see it whole, it's greater than its two parts."[26] In 2009, he namedKill Bill one of the 20 best films of the decade.[27]
Thurman received a Golden GlobeBest Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama nomination in 2005. Carradine also received aBest Supporting Actor nomination.[citation needed]Empire namedKill Bill: Volume 2 the 423rd-greatest film[citation needed] and the Bride the 66th-greatest film character.[28] In 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition ofThe New York Times' list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 245.[29]
In April 2004, Tarantino toldEntertainment Weekly that he intended to make aKill Bill sequel at least 15 years after the second film. He planned that the character of Nikki would seek revenge on the Bride for killing her mother, Vernita Green, inVolume 1.[30] At the 2006San Diego Comic-Con, Tarantino said that, after the completion ofGrindhouse, he wanted to make two animeKill Bill films: anorigin story about Bill and his mentors, and another origin starring the Bride.[31][32] In 2007,Bloody Disgusting reported thatVolume 3 would involve two killers attacked by the Bride in the first films, and thatVolume 4 "concerns a cycle of reprisals and daughters who avenge their mother's deaths".[33] At the 2009Morelia International Film Festival, Tarantino reiterated that he intended to make a thirdKill Bill film.[34] That month, he said thatKill Bill 3 would be his ninth film and would be released in 2014.[35] He said he wanted 10 years to pass to give her and the Bride and her daughter a period of peace.[36]
In December 2012, Tarantino said there would "probably not" be a third film."[37][38] However, in July 2019, he said that he and Thurman had talked again about a sequel and that "if any of my movies were going to spring from my other movies, it would be a thirdKill Bill".[39] That December, Tarantino said he had spoken to Thurman again about the film, and was "definitely in the cards".[40] In June 2021, Tarantino said he was excited about the possibility of Thurman and her daughter,Maya Hawke, playing the Bride and B.B. He also said the characters of Driver, Sofie Fatale and Gogo's twin sister, Shiaki, could appear.[41] Later that month, Tarantino said he did not want to take on moreKill Bill films following the fatigue he endured making the first two.[42] In July 2023, Tarantino said a sequel would not be made.[43]
Kill Bill: Volume 2's total ... confirmed the financial good sense of Miramax's decision to split the movie in two.
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