Quentin Tarantino has reportedly scrapped plans for his 10th and final project The Movie Critic.
Deadline claims they have been told by a source close to the director the film has been dropped, because the 61-year-old American film director and screenwriter, who became a sensation in 1992 with Reservoir Dogs, simply changed his mind.
The film was to star Brad Pitt, which would have marked the pair’s third collaboration following Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There were rumours cast members from previous films would also be involved in the project.
The inspiration for the movie goes back to a job Tarantino had as a teen, which involved him loading porn magazines into a vending machine and emptying quarters out of the money dispenser.
“All the other stuff was too skanky to read, but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” he told Deadline last year. The Movie Critic, which was planned to have been set in California in 1977, and “based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag...
“He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic,” Tarantino remarked of the inspiration. “I think he was a very good critic. He was cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle might be if he were a film critic.”This is the biggest surprise to Tarantino fans since it was revealed he had shelved The Hateful Eight. Tarantino had previously announced he would retire only after making 10 movies.
The news follows Tarantino putting production of the film on hold in 2019, when at a Bafta event in London he said “it’s going to be a little bit down the line”.
