QUENTIN TARANTINO NO LONGER MAKING ‘THE MOVIE CRITIC' AS FINAL FILM
Quentin Tarantino is going back to the drawing board for his tenth and final film. The auteur had been preparing to start shooting The Movie Critic this year, but is backing away from the project, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.
Tarantino has been toying with The Movie Critic in recent months. Set in 1977 California, it initially drew inspiration from a cynical movie critic that the filmmaker grew up reading. But sources say it morphed along the way into a film that would feature Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, the stuntman he portrayed in an Oscar-winning performance in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It is unclear if this film was going to be a prequel or a 1970s sequel to Hollywood. But in recent weeks, Tarantino had a change of heart again, and moved away from the film entirely.
The film was going to shoot for one day in August to qualify for a California Tax Credit, before it began production in earnest in 2025. That is now no longer on the table. THR first broke the news of the feature more than a year ago in March, and it has been the subject of much speculation, given Tarantino's pledge to retire from directing after making one final project. (He has made nine films, if you count hte two-part Kill Bill movies as one feature.)
In 2012, he told Playboy, "I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don't get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film f-s 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 When directors get out-of-date, it's not pretty."
No studio was attached to The Movie Critic, which becomes the latest project to fall by the wayside for Tarantino. He previously worked on an R-rated Star Trek movie for Paramount that did not come to fruition.