Quentin Tarantino has apparently walked away from his planned final film, The Movie Critic. More on the news here.
Here’s some news straight out of the blue this morning: Quentin Tarantino has reportedly walked away from The Movie Critic, and given that the filmmaker’s next movie is supposed to be his last, he likely won’t be returning to it.
Instead, Tarantino is said to be looking at doing something else entirely. This rather shocking news comes courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter, with the outlet citing unnamed sources as the origin of the story.
Only a few days ago, reports were suggesting that the film had finally locked down a shoot date following delays caused by last year’s strikes. Now, if this story proves to be true, it looks like the film might never happen at all.
There is definitely an ‘if’ connected to this story though. Tarantino can sometimes be pretty mercurial when it comes to getting his projects into production. Remember his very public back and forth over shooting The Hateful Eight after the film’s script was leaked online? At one point he stated he’d never make the film, but as we know, he changed his mind fairly quickly.
Of course, complicating matters further here is another of Tarantino’s well-publicised pledges: that his next film will be his last as a director. Capping off such a celebrated career with a flourish is quite a tall order… even topping his last film, the greatly admired Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood is an unenviable task, let alone adding something truly special to a filmography that is as admired as his.
Whether that has figured into his reasoning, we simply don’t know. What we do know is that The Movie Critic was shaping up to be a film that we really wanted to see.
A 1977 setting; potential appearances by Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt (reprising his role as stuntman Cliff Booth from Once Upon A TIme In… Hollywood) and a setup which is believed to have included fictionalised versions of real movies are all things that we were very much looking forward to. A segment where Tarantino lampoons Star Wars would have almost have made up for the Star Trek movie that Tarantino teased and then never gave us, so the news of this project’s demise means it will forever be doomed to come up in those chats among film fans about films about dream projects that never came to fruition.
Well, unless Tarantino changes his mind.
We’ll bring you more on this story as it unfolds, and given Tarantino’s penchant for discussing his projects, sooner or later we’ll eventually find out why he changed his mind so late in the day.
