Quentin Tarantino abandons plan for The Movie Critic as final film

Quentin Tarantino has reportedly scrapped The Movie Critic, which he had earlier said would be his directorial swan song.

The project had picked up pace when news broke in February that Brad Pitt was being cast in The Movie Critic. Sources at the time said that Pitt may be reprising his Oscar-winning role as Cliff Booth from Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Had the film moved forward, it would have been Tarantino and Pitt’s third collaboration after Inglourious Basterds and Hollywood.

However, Deadline has now claimed that Tarantino has “simply had a change of heart” so “is going back to the drawing board to figure out what that final movie will be”.

Not much was known about the proposed film, except that Tarantino told Deadline in 2023 it would be set in 1977 California and “based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag”.

The inspiration came from a job Tarantino had as a teen, loading porn magazines into a vending machine. “All the other stuff was too skanky to read, but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” he added.

Speaking of the unnamed critic Tarantino said: “He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle might be if he were a film critic.”

The Pulp Fiction director gave no more information, saying, “I can’t tell you guys [anything] until you see the movie. I’m tempted to do some of the character’s monologues right now, but I’m not going to. Maybe if there were less video cameras. You just have to wait and see”.

Tarantino had also secured a $20.2m subsidy from California for the film, it was reported in September last year. At the time, the film was only identified as “#10”, a reference to it being the director’s 10th film. It is unclear what the subsidy will be used for now.

Tarantino has, in the past, returned to projects he has shelved. He abandoned work on The Hateful Eight in 2014 after a rough draft of the script he had shared with a small group of actors was leaked online. Tarantino called it a “betrayal” but then made and released the film in 2015.

The director has long said he would retire from directing after completing his final project, which would be his 10th.

“I know film history and from here on in, filmmakers do not get better,” he told Bill Maher in a 2021 interview.

“I am all about my filmography, and one bad film f**** up three good ones. I don’t want that bad, out-of-touch comedy in my filmography, the movie that makes people think, ‘Oh man, he still thinks it’s 20 years ago.’ When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty,” he said in an interview to Playboy magazine in 2012.