The Movie Critic Will No Longer Be Quentin Tarantino’s Final Film

Director Quentin Tarantino, widely regarded as one of the best American filmmakers of his generation, has been adamant that he will stop directing after hit 10th feature film. For quite a while, it has been known that that final film would be The Movie Critic, and several big stars had been rumored to be part of the project. Things had been set to go at Sony, who produced and distributed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for Tarantino in 2019. Things have changed, however, and The Movie Critic is not moving forward.

According to a report from Deadline, Tarantino will no longer be making The Movie Critic as his final film. It’s not that he’s going to be directing The Movie Critic and continuing on to something else after that. He’s still planning to retire after this 10th film, but The Movie Critic won’t be it. 

The film was to be set in 1977 and follow a cynical movie critic, based heavily on a critic whose work Tarantino read a lot growing up. Deadline‘s report suggests that Brad Pitt was set for a lead role in the film, reuniting him with Tarantino for a third project together. 

According to The Hollywood Reporter, however, Pitt’s involvement went even deeper. Tarantino had reportedly adjusted his script in recent weeks to include Cliff Booth, the stuntman from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood played by Pitt, and the actor was going to be reprising his role. The entire project has been scrapped, though, and Tarantino has halted development so he can go back to the drawing board with a brand new script.

While there had been different versions of The Movie Critic leading up to its recent overhaul, Tarantino spoke to Deadline in 2023 and explained what was planned for the film’s story.

“[It is] based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.” Tarantino explained in the interview. “He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle [from Taxi Driver] might be if he were a film critic … Think about Travis’s diary entries. But the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his sh-t was really funny. He was as rude as hell.”