Quentin Tarantino is no longer planning to make “The Movie Critic,” which he had earlier said would be his final film as a director. It was confirmed Wednesday that the director had given the project a thumbs down.
“The Movie Critic” would have been Tarantino’s tenth feature film, but sources say he won’t be looking to rewrite the script or revive the project, but will instead move on to something new.
Brad Pitt had been cast in a lead role in the film that Tarantino had said was about a small-time movie critic who wrote smart reviews for a porn magazine, and was set in 1977. It was also rumored that Pitt would play some form of his “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” character Cliff Booth, who in Tarantino’s novelization of the story was a big movie fan.
He told an audience at the Cannes Film Festival last year, “I can’t tell you guys [anything] until you see the movie. I’m tempted to do some of the character’s monologues right now, but I’m not going to. Maybe if there were less video cameras. You just have to wait and see.”
The plan to film “The Movie Critic” was moving along before Tarantino had a change of heart: in addition to casting Pitt, the production had secured a $20 million tax subsidy from the state of California.
It’s not clear what project he might choose as his next film as he had also decided against an R-rated “Star Trek” film in 2019, saying it was too big a project. “Look, I might come up with a really big idea. But right now, the idea of a smaller audience almost all the way around is appealing to me,” he said at the time.
In 2022, he tossed around the idea of making an eight-episode TV series, but that too never came to fruition.
The news was first reported by Deadline.
more to come…