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It's always sad when we lose a movie from an auteur. And with Tarantino's personal limit on the number of movies he's going to direct, it's especially sad to miss out on a movie that he was putting together.
When The Movie Critic was announced as Tarantino's tenth and final film, it was the subject of a tornado of rumors. Everyone wanted to know what note the famed director would go out on.
We had a fervor of casting ideas and plot elements, and then the heartbreaking story that the movie was scrapped.
So today, I want to go through what we had learned and what the plot of the perspective movie was going to be.
Let's dive in.
Quentin Tarantino Passing on 'The Movie Critic' as Final Film
When Quentin Tarantino announced his plans for The Movie Critic, we were teased with a story about a cynical, disillusioned movie critic writing for a pornographic magazine in the 1970s. It might have followed his journey towards redemption or a deeper exploration of his psyche.
People compared the idea to Taxi Driver and proposed that it would star Paul Walter Hauser or comedian Shane Gillis. We know that he met with Olivia Wilde for an undisclosed reasons, was it to star in this movie or just chat? Hard to tell.
But then we got an attachment of Brad Pitt, and people wondered if he was coming back to play Cliff Booth, from Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood later in life.
Now, The Hollywood Reporter has an entire breakdown where it shows the pivot from that kind of movie, into a possible metafilm with a Tarantino "goodbye metaverse".
So, how would that have looked?
Well, Tarantino could have included actors from his past films reprising roles or appearing as fictional versions of themselves, perhaps even crossing over into new narratives via "movies within a movie".
And as the owner of a couple theaters in Los Angeles, we might have seen them all reuniting at the New Beverly or Vista. Or maybe there would be a younger Tarantino character in this, who gets influenced by the people he meets and then grows up to make movies.
The sky was the limit on what this could be, and it appears that after some thought, Tarantino decided to scrap the project entirely, and go back to the drawing board for his tenth film.
That means we have no real ideas about what he wants to do. And we cannot be sure when he'll come back out with another idea.
Tarantino is one of the most important working filmmakers, and part of a generation of original filmmakers that will be sad to lose. I hope he takes his time and makes whatever he wants next, whether it's next year or in a decade.
I am not eager for the era of Quentin Tarantino to be over.
