Quentin Tarantino‘s upcoming “southern” Django Unchained won’t be hitting theaters until Christmas, but in the meantime the Weinstein Company and Columbia Pictures have released the film’s first poster.

You can check it out here below.

No cruddy Photoshop hack work here folks, this is the real deal. Tarantino has spoken many times in the past about his unabashed love for Italian spaghetti westerns and how they have influenced his own style of filmmaking. Several of his recent films, including Kill Bill V.2 and Inglourious Basterds, have worn that influence with pride. Tarantino has even used music score cues composed for the best Italian westerns by the great Ennio Morricone on the soundtracks of some of his past features. Thus, it’s very fitting that the poster for Django Unchained would recall the minimalist movie poster style of the 1960’s when directors like Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and Enzo G. Castellari were revered as cinematic gods to western fans and young movie geeks like Tarantino who were just itching for the sweaty, bloody thrills they a spaghetti western could deliver without fail.

Django Unchained stars Jamie Foxx in the title role of a slave who becomes a bounty hunter under the tutelage of a German dentist (Christophe Waltz) and sets out to rescue his wife (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of Mississippi plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). The cast also includes Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, James Remar, Sacha Baron Cohen, Don Johnson, Anthony LaPaglia, Michael K. Williams, James Russo, Gerald McRaney, and Tom Savini.

Check out the movie’s Facebook page for more updates and information.

Django Unchained opens on December 25, 2012.

Poster

[Source: Yahoo! Movies]