Brad Pitt could be about to join the cast of Quentin Tarantino’s latest (and possibly last) film, The Movie Critic. More here:
It’s all up there in the headline, really, isn’t it? Brad Pitt might be joining The Movie Critic, Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming film which the director has long said will be his last.
Tarantino and Pitt previously worked together on Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, with Pitt memorably playing the stuntman Cliff Booth in the latter. In fact, Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr has an intriguing theory about Pitt’s role in The Movie Critic – that he’ll be playing the lead, and will reprise the role of Cliff Booth.
The Movie Critic is said to be set in 1977 – eight years after the events of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood – and is “based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.”
Fleming Jr notes that the Once Upon A Time In Hollywood novel describes Booth as a big film fan, with the suggestion being that Booth might turn his hand to film criticism by the late 1970s.
If Pitt is playing the lead role, then it’s quite a change from the rumours going around in September 2023, when it was said that Paul Walter Hauser would play the titular protagonist. It’s fair to say that Hauser is a very different looking (and much younger) actor than Pitt. In fact, Tarantino has previously said that Pitt’s too old to play the central character, who’s supposed to be about 35 years old, which means the filmmaker’s either rewritten the role or that the Cliff Booth theory is wide of the mark.
Whoever plays the lead, they’ll need to inhabit a character with a talent for barbed criticism. “He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic,” Tarantino said of the real-life inspiration for The Movie 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 [Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver] might be if he were a film critic.”
The Movie Critic is said to be penciled in for release next year. We’ll bring you more as we get it.
