The title suggests Tarantino could be upping the ante, playing off the title of John Sturges' 1960 film The Magnificent Seven, which in turn was a remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 Seven Samurai.

No one has been cast yet, but Tarantino has reached out to veteran casting director Victoria Thomas, who worked on Django, to work with him on casting the movie, say several insiders. A part has been written for Christoph Waltz, who starred in Tarantino's Django and Inglourious Basterds.

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Pilar Savone, who served as a producer on Django and acted as an associate producer on Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Death Proof after being his assistant, is producing Hateful Eight.

It’s unclear who is financing and who will distribute, although The Weinstein Co. is the most likely candidate to be involved in both capacities, due to its long-standing relationship with the filmmaker.

In November, Tarantino revealed that he was working on a new script and that it would be a Western. But he didn’t reveal a title or suggest a timetable for making it. Tarantino has in the past mentioned projects he was working on but ended up shelving them. Basterds famously took a decade to hit the screen as he worked and reworked the script.

"I had so much fun doing Django, and I love Westerns so much that after I taught myself how to make one, it's like 'OK! Let me make another one now that I know what I'm doing,' " Tarantino told Jay Leno in November when he appeared on The Tonight Show.

Tarantino has long loved the Western genre and in the post-Pulp Fiction era in the mid- to late 1990s tried to adapt Elmore Leonard’s Forty Lashes Less One, about two prisoners, an Apache and a black soldier, who must hunt down five outlaws to earn their freedom.

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