We still don’t know what Quentin Tarantino’s tenth and final movie will be, but for a moment, it was going to be The Movie Critic. However, the director wound up scrapping the film, and he explained why on a recent appearance on The Church of Tarantino podcast.
Tarantino revealed that The Movie Critic actually started out as an eight-episode TV series, before he reworked it into a feature. He was moving full speed ahead, but once pre-production began, he knew he wasn’t feeling as passionate about it as he should. “I knew I had done it, but I didn’t really want to do it that much… I wasn’t excited about dramatizing what I wrote,” he said.
“The thing about The Movie Critic is I really, really like it,” he said, “but there was a challenge I gave myself when I did it, both as a series and as a movie: can I take the most boring profession in the world and make it an interesting movie. Who wants to see a movie about a f***ing movie critic?“
Tarantino added that the film was something of a “spiritual sequel” to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but there were no crossover characters. There were rumours that Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth would appear in the movie, but Tarantino said that wasn’t true. “That’s all a bunch of bullshit,” he said. “That never was the case ever, ever, ever.“
At the end of the day, Tarantino lost his desire for the movie but still wanted to explore something in the world of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Thus, the Cliff Booth movie was born, but he encountered the same problem; it was too much like the last movie and didn’t present the challenge he wanted. “I love this script, but I’m still walking down the same ground I’ve already walked. It just kind of unenthused me,” he said. “This last movie, I’ve got to not know what I’m doing again. I’ve got to be in uncharted territory.“
David Fincher has since taken over the Cliff Booth movie, so we will get to see it, but Tarantino’s final project remains a mystery.
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