The Movie Critic will no longer be the final film for Quentin Tarantino.
According to Deadline, the 61-year-old writer/director simply had a change of heart about the project, even after he reworked the script and the casting of Brad Pitt had been reported.
Tarantino provided Deadline with a detailed summary of The Movie Critic last year, revealing the film was set in 1977 and "based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag."
"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 of the main character employed at a fictional magazine called Popstar Pages.
Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that a recent iteration of the script for The Movie Critic saw Pitt reprising his Academy Award-winning role as stuntman Cliff Booth in 2019's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. It's unclear how Booth factored into the larger plot. Deadline adds there were "rumors that many from the casts of his past films might take part."
The plan was to complete one day of shooting in August to qualify for California's Film & TV tax credit program worth $20.5 million, then resume production in early 2025.
Tarantino will now reportedly return to the drawing board as he figures out what will be his 10th and final movie. This current gap between flicks will inevitably mark the longest ever for the two-time Oscar-winner; Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood already turns five this summer, and fans once waited six years between Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Jackie Brown.
QT has long indicated that he intends to retire from directing features after his 10th outing. He seemed to be staying the course a decade ago while promoting The Hateful Eight. "I like that I will leave a 10-film filmography, and so I've got two more to go after this," he told Deadline at the time. "It's not etched in stone, but that is the plan."
Does The Movie Critic's evident demise mean we'll finally get a third Kill Bill? We can hope. Then again, QT publicly scrapped a project before—the aforementioned Hateful Eight—when the script leaked. "Tarantino felt betrayed, but he eventually returned to the project after staging a reading for charity and drawing raves for it," Deadline recounts.
