Quentin Tarantino is going back to the drawing board for his 10th 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 had been honing The Movie Critic for 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-set sequel to Hollywood. But in recent weeks, Tarantino had a change of heart again and moved away from the film entirely.
The project was going to shoot for one day in August to qualify for a $20.5 million California Tax Credit, before it began production in earnest in early 2025. That is now no longer on the table.
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. There was speculation that Sony, which released Hollywood, would be a natural home for Tarantino’s latest.
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, his 10th. (He has made nine films, if you count the two-part Kill Bill movies as one feature.)
He has long maintained that he wants to go out on the top of his game.
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 When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty.”
Tarantino is expected to continue working in the creative fields even after he makes one last feature. He has suggested directing limited series or plays could be in his future. He is also now a novelist, publishing a novelization of Hollywood in 2021. Among its revelations was a deeper understanding of Cliff Booth’s backstory and psychology.