Quentin Tarantino's cancelled final movie sounds a wild ride
The Movie Critic may have brought the director's previous characters together for one last bash
Quentin Tarantino’s proposed final movie The Movie Critic has been canned. But after hearing what it may have been like, we’re not sure whether to be heartbroken or relieved.
The Movie Critic may have ended up a strange meta-movie, where characters from the legendary director’s other films made an appearance.
And the starting place was a sequel of sorts to 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The film originally started out as a flick about a man, a real-life character, who wrote the movie reviews for a “porno mag,” but it took on these unusual meta-textural elements after a flurry of re-writes by Tarantino.
Rumours suggested Brad Pitt would return as stuntman Cliff Booth (from Once Upon a Time), while previous Tarantino collaborators Margot Robbie (Once Upon a Time), John Travolta (Pulp Fiction) and Jamie Foxx (Django Unchained) were also mooted.
How you weave in the star of the 30-year-old Pulp Fiction into film that, on the face of it, appears to be set earlier in time is anyone’s guess. There was even talk of Tom Cruise featuring — a man yet to appear in a Tarantino movie, but an actor who was reportedly once considered for Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth character.
It sounds like a tangled cinematic web, but does make a bit more sense in the movie-making world established in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
So what happened? As one of the only auteurs with big box office pull, the decision apparently came from Tarantino rather than the movie studio execs.
“He had grown more excited by other ideas,” we hear from The Hollywood Reporter’s unnamed source.
It’s been an odd couple of years for Tarantino. Since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino has reportedly written episodes of a western TV show, called Bounty Law, starring the fictional character Rick Dalton (Brad Pitt) from the real 2019 movie.
Quentin Tarantino also announced fictional character Rick Dalton’s death in 2023. And that’s — well — it’s a bit odd isn’t it?
Perhaps Tarantino deserves more faith than most, give (opinions may vary) he hasn’t made a bad movie across his Hollywood career. This is currently the longest gap between Tarantino movies since the late 90s, and the six-year gap between Jackie Brown and the duo of Kill Bill films.