Quentin Tarantino has changed his mind: the director who became famous with iconic works such as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, has ‘killed’ his latest project, provisionally titled The Movie Critic which should also have been his tenth and final film. Deadline’s news was confirmed by other American entertainment media. There would be no mystery, nor financing problems, but only a creative choice behind the decision of the 61-year-old master who threw Hollywood into confusion: “he simply changed his mind”, writes Deadline. Among rumors of other stars of previous films called to participate in what would have been the director’s ‘swan song’, The Movie critic should have given another leading role to Brad Pitt, in his third collaboration with Tarantino after Basterds Without glory in 2009 and ten years later in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Sony was also involved, with whom Tarantino worked in 2019, bringing home ten Oscar nominations and a global box office success with 377 million dollars in takings. Filming was supposed to begin for one day only in August (a necessary formality to bring home 20 million dollars in incentives from the state of California) and begin in earnest only in 2025. All this is now history.
The project had been talked about for many months: set in 1977 in California, it was initially supposed to focus on the irreverent and acute film critic of a porn magazine, a partly autobiographical story given that Tarantino, as a boy, loaded that newspaper into the vending machines at street corners.
The subject then changed several times: from the imaginary The Popstar Pages it ended up having Brad Pitt in the part of Cliff Booth, the stuntman who had won the actor the Oscar in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. There was therefore talk of a prequel or even a sequel to the 2019 film. In recent weeks, however, Tarantino has decided to say enough. It now remains to be understood what the future holds for the master of Reservoir Dogs: for years, when The Movie Critic was still a project in the future, Tarantino had announced that he wanted to retire when he was still at the top of his profession. “A bad film – he told Playboy in 2012 – rips off the three previous good ones. I don’t want it to happen to my filmography. When directors pass their expiration date it’s not nice.” Speaking for the first time over a year ago about The Movie Critic, the director said that that film – the tenth if the two chapters of Kill Bill are considered as a single film – would be the last. On the other hand, Tarantino has returned to projects that were put in the pipeline and then cancelled. In 2014 he temporarily shelved The Hateful Eight for a year when a draft of the script surfaced online after being shown to a group of actors.
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