Brad Pitt and Quentin Tarantino said to re-team for ‘The Movie Critic’

Jordan Hoffman
·3 min read
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Anyone in the biz knows that the true representation of a movie critic has never been seen in mass media. Sitting in the dark before racing to make an embargo-break deadline, then kvetching online about weak third acts? Brad Pitt material, all of it.

Luckily, Quentin Tarantino’s next project may fix all that. Deadline reported that a deal is imminent for the director and star to reunite for Tarantino’s next and (allegedly) final picture, “The Movie Critic.” Pitt won Best Supporting Actor at the 2020 Oscars for his turn in Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” which also won Best Production Design for Barbara Ling and Nancy Haigh, plus eight other nominations, including Best Picture. The two also worked together on “Inglorious Basterds.”

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Now, we’re making a lot of assumptions here about whether Pitt will play the title role. For a while, it was rumored that the film was based, to some degree, on the life of Pauline Kael. (In the late 1970s, Paramount Pictures actually hired her as a consultant for a while, at the behest of Warren Beatty, and it didn’t go too well.) Later, there was talk of the film being about a guy who wrote film criticism for a pornographic magazine, something Tarantino himself confirmed during last year’s Cannes Film Festival. 

“He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle [Robert DeNiro’s character in ‘Taxi Driver’] might be if he were a film critic,” Tarantino said in an interview with Deadline last year about the script. “But the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny. He was as rude as hell.”

In that interview, Tarantino said the critic “wrote like he was 55 but he was only in his early to mid-30s” and died young, in his late 30s. (Pitt is 60.)

“It wasn’t clear for a while but now I’ve done some more research and I think it was it was complications due to alcoholism,” Tarantino said of the film critic. 

Meanwhile, the always talkative Paul Schrader previously told a French newspaper that Tarantino intended to re-shoot sequences from 1970s films, including “Rolling Thunder,” but to incorporate Schrader’s original ending. (If you recall, Tarantino inserted Leonardo DiCaprio into clips of “The Great Escape” in “Once Upon a Time.”)

Whether that’s still the plan is unknown. Deadline suggested Tarantino had done a lot of rewriting on the critic since his Cannes interview.

Tarantino is a two-time Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay, for “Pulp Fiction” (shared with Roger Avary) and “Django Unchained.” He’s been nominated for Best Director three times, for “Pulp Fiction,” “Inglorious Basterds” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood:”

It is believed that Sony will release “The Movie Critic,” as they did with “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” but there has been no official announcement. Tarantino has said “The Movie Critic” will be his final feature film.

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