Last year we were fantasizing about the possible creation of a Quentin Tarantino Cinematic Universe via The Movie Critic, and apparently our imaginations hadn’t gone too far beyond reality.
An exciting investigation published in these hours by The Hollywood Reporter, in fact, reveals new background on the cancellation of The Movie Critic, initially created as the tenth and final film of Quentin Tarantino’s career but canceled by the author in the last few days: as we already told you reported previously, during the development of the project Tarantino had evolved his original screenplay from The Movie Critic (about a film critic for an adult magazine) in a real spin-off of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Brad Pitt would return as Cliff Booth, it is not known whether for a prequel or a sequel) , but now The Hollywood Reporter reveals interesting new information about the development of the film, which apparently it turned out to be very unsatisfactory for the author. “I don’t remember a time when Tarantino rewrote his screenplay so many times or postponed the start date of shooting on one of his films so often” a source close to the author told THR, who would canceled The Movie Critic because ‘much more enthusiastic about other ideas’.
As for the story of The Movie Critic, however, THR mentions four different screenplays: Originally, the film was going to be about the real deceased film critic Pauline Kael, as the rumors initially wanted (then confirmed). Then it turned into a movie about a ’70s porn critic – maybe Jim Sheldon – but that project was put on the back burner for a film about Cliff Booth by Brad Pitt, which, according to THR, would have been very similar to the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novel, also written by Tarantino. In the end, the fourth idea was that of a Tarantino Cinematic Universefor a farewell meta-movie that would weave together all of the director’s previous films and re-imagine them for The Movie Critic’s era: essentially, Tarantino would recruit the real stars of those films to reprise their iconic characters in scenes from “film within a film”, or to play fictional versions of themselves as the actors who played those characters. This scoop from THR practically confirms Jeff Sneider’s predictions from last year, according to which Tarantino would have recruited John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell and Bruce Willis for cameos in The Movie Critic. Finally, Paul Walter Hauser is also mentioned, cited by scooper Daniel Richtman in 2023 as a possible protagonist: THR states that at a certain point Tarantino would have shot a short sequence last February with Hauser, but a source close to the actor states that “it is not never been involved.”
The article, in its entirety, suggests how Quentin Tarantino is working towards a final film that can sum up his cinematic legacy: with The Movie Critic he tried a thousand different ways, but was never satisfied with the final result.
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