They are stopped by Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter seeking to buy Django for his knowledge of the three outlaw Brittle brothers.

The next morning, the chained Django is tortured and about to be castrated by overseer Billy Crash when Stephen arrives, informing him that Candie's sister Lara, who has taken charge of the plantation, has ordered him to be sold to a mining company and worked to death.

Recovering Broomhilda's freedom papers from Schultz's corpse, Django bids his deceased mentor goodbye and avenges him and D'Artagnan by killing the trackers.

Additional roles include Lee Horsley as Sheriff Gus, Rex Linn as Tennessee Harry, Misty Upham as Minnie, and Danièle Watts as Coco.

Zoë Bell, Michael Bowen, Robert Carradine, Jake Garber, Ted Neeley, James Parks, and Tom Savini play Candyland trackers.

Michael Parks as Roy and John Jarratt as Floyd, alongside Tarantino himself in a cameo appearance as Frankie, play the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company employees.

[6] In 2007, Quentin Tarantino discussed an idea for a type of Spaghetti Western set in the United States' pre-Civil War Deep South.

[20] Franco Nero, the original Django from the 1966 Italian film, was rumored for the role of Calvin Candie,[21] but instead was given a cameo appearance as a minor character.

[28] Jonah Hill was offered the role of Scotty Harmony, a gambler who loses Broomhilda to Candie in a poker game,[29] but turned it down due to scheduling conflicts with The Watch.

[33] In a January 2013 interview with Vanity Fair, costume designer Sharen Davis said much of the film's wardrobe was inspired by spaghetti Westerns and other works of art.

Davis said the idea of Calvin Candie's costume came partly from Rhett Butler, and that Don Johnson's signature Miami Vice look inspired Big Daddy's cream-colored linen suit in the film.

[35] Principal photography for Django Unchained started in California in November 2011[36] continuing in Wyoming in February 2012[37] and at the National Historic Landmark Evergreen Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, in March 2012.

[39] Although originally scripted, a sub-plot centering on Zoë Bell's masked tracker was cut, and remained unfilmed, due to time constraints.

And to dramatize her punishment inside an underground, coffin-size metal container, she and Tarantino agreed she would spend time barely clothed in the "hot box" before the filming began so the feeling of confinement would be as realistic as possible.

The film also features a few famous pieces of western classical music, including Beethoven's "Für Elise" and "Dies Irae" from Verdi's Requiem.

In August 2011, at Tarantino's request, the production companies bought the concept artwork from Mancosu to use for promotional purposes as well as on the crew passes and clothing for staff during filming.

[59] Lily Kuo, writing for Quartz, wrote that "the film depicts one of America's darker periods, when slavery was legal, which Chinese officials like to use to push back against criticism from the United States".

The website's critical consensus reads, "Bold, bloody, and stylistically daring, Django Unchained is another incendiary masterpiece from Quentin Tarantino.

"[68] Metacritic, which assigns a rating to reviews, gives the film a weighted average score of 81 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

"[73] Dan Jolin of Empire magazine praised DiCaprio's performance, saying he "plays [the role of Candie] to hateful perfection: a spiteful, brown-toothed bully, avaricious, vain and prone to flattery", but criticized Foxx as a comparatively weak link whose "soft, musical voice [...] jars against Django's terse deliveries".

"[76] New Yorker's Anthony Lane was "disturbed by their [Tarantino's fans'] yelps of triumphant laughter, at the screening I attended, as a white woman was blown away by Django's guns.

[78] Dana Phillips writes: "Tarantino's film is immensely entertaining, not despite but because it is so very audacious—even, at times, downright lurid, thanks to its treatment of slavery, race relations, and that staple of the Western, violence.

"[94] Actor and activist Jesse Williams has contrasted accuracy of the racist language used in the film with what he sees as the film's lack of accuracy about the general lives of slaves, too often portrayed as "well-dressed Negresses in flowing gowns, frolicking on swings and enjoying leisurely strolls through the grounds, as if the setting is Versailles, mixed in with occasional acts of barbarism against slaves ... That authenticity card that Tarantino uses to buy all those 'niggers' has an awfully selective memory.

[95] Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe praised the realism of the villain Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson, comparing him to such black Republicans as Clarence Thomas or Herman Cain.

"[98] The review by Jesse Williams notes, however, that these antisemitic terms were not used nearly as frequently in Tarantino's film about Nazis, Inglourious Basterds, as he used "nigger" in Django.

[100] Conservative columnist Jeff Kuhner responded to the SNL skit for The Washington Times, saying: "Anti-white bigotry has become embedded in our postmodern culture.

Writing in The New Yorker, William Jelani Cobb observed that Tarantino's occasional historical elasticity sometimes worked to the film's advantage.

"There are moments," Cobb wrote, "where this convex history works brilliantly, like when Tarantino depicts the Ku Klux Klan a decade prior to its actual formation in order to thoroughly ridicule its members' veiled racism.

However, after Tarantino decided that the tone of the developing story did not fit with the character's morals, he began re-writing it as an original screenplay which later became the director's follow-up film, The Hateful Eight.

[121] In June 2019, Tarantino had picked Jerrod Carmichael to co-write a film adaptation based on the Django/Zorro crossover comic book series.