Quentin Tarantino has reportedly abandoned his plans for The Movie Critic, the film that was to be his 10th and final project.
Deadline reported on Thursday that an anonymous source close to Tarantino had confirmed the news, reporting that Tarantino had “simply changed his mind” about making The Movie Critic and would be “going back to the drawing board to figure out what that final movie will be”.
The 61-year-old director has long said he would only make 10 films before retiring. He has said that he considers Kill Bill to be one film, although it was split into two parts, and that he does not count his first project, an amateur film called My Best Friend’s Birthday that was never released, towards the total.
The Movie Critic, which was set to be his 10th film and would star Brad Pitt, was inspired by Tarantino’s job as a teenager: 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,” Tarantino told Deadline in 2023. He said the film “is based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag … He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny. He was as rude as hell.”
“He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic,” Tarantino later said, of his unnamed inspiration. “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 Movie Critic was to be set in California in 1977 and the critic would be working for a fictional publication called The Popstar Pages, Tarantino had confirmed. He also said he was looking for a lead “in the 35-year-old ball park” and “a new leading man for me”.
It had been rumoured that Pitt would play his Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood character Cliff Booth, who was a big movie fan in Tarantino’s novelisation of the film.
Production on the film was previously delayed when Tarantino decided to rewrite the script.
Tarantino has previously returned to projects after shelving them: in 2014 he temporarily cancelled his plans to make The Hateful Eight when a rough draft of the film’s script leaked online after he shared it with a small group of actors. After calling this a “betrayal” and saying “I have no desire to make it”, The Hateful Eight was eventually made and released in 2015.
