The Movie Critic (Tarantino Drops ‘The Movie Critic’ As His Final Film)

Quentin Tarantino is back for the last time.

The filmmaker behind some of the most indelible movies of the last three decades, Pulp Fiction and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood among them, is putting together what sources say is being billed as his final movie.

The Movie Critic is the name of the script that Tarantino wrote and is prepping to direct this fall, according to sources.

Logline details are being kept in a suitcase but sources describe the story as being set in late 1970s Los Angeles with a female lead at its center.

It is possible the story focuses on Pauline Kael, one of the most influential movie critics of all time. Kael, who died in 2001, was not just a critic but also an essayist and novelist. She was known for her pugnacious fights with editors as well as filmmakers. In the late 1970s, Kael had a very brief tenure working as a consultant for Paramount, a position she accepted at the behest of actor Warren Beatty. The timing of that Paramount job seems to coincide with the setting of the script — and the filmmaker is known to have a deep respect for Kael, making the odds of her being the subject of the film more likely.

The project does not have a studio home; it could go out to studios or buyers as early as this week, according to sources. One frontrunner could be Sony, where Tarantino has a tight relationship with topper Tom Rothman. Sony distributed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the filmmaker’s in 2019 opus to 1960s moviemaking and also gave him a unique deal in which the copyright reverts to him over time. Hollywood also won two Oscars after nabbing 10 nominations and grossed over $377 million worldwide.

Tarantino has for two decades commanded the ability to attract the most-coveted actors, working with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt two times each. He directed Christoph Waltz to two Oscar wins. Samuel L. Jackson is a frequent collaborator. If this truly is his final film, he will have no shortage of thespians dropping everything to line up for roles.

The filmmaker has long maintained he had a finite number of movies in him, saying he wanted to direct 10 films or retire by the time he was 60. The writer-director has made nine (if you count the two Kill Bill movies as one) and turns 60 later this month.

He also has espoused a philosophy that directors get out of touch as they age. In 2012, he told Playboy, “I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film f—s up three good ones. I don’t want that bad, out-of-touch comedy in my filmography, the movie that makes people think, ‘Oh man, he still thinks it’s 20 years ago.’ When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty.”

Tarantino is one of Hollywood’s most celebrated auteurs, obsessed with film history and throwaway genres that tended to operate on the fringes of the industry, such as Spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation, and chopsocky. But his modern and elevated take on those genres has earned him two Oscar wins for best writing (for Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained), three best directing nominations, and one best picture nomination.

Even though he plans on retiring from filmmaking, he has expressed interest in other creative outlets, noting in interviews that he could direct limited series or plays. In 2021, he published his first novel, a novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

THR

Quentin Tarantino was in Paris this evening promoting his book “Cinema Speculation,” which, I’m hearing, inspired him to write his next film.

In a Q&A with Thierry Fremaux, Tarantino sought to clear the air about his upcoming new film. He confirmed that its title is indeed “The Movie Critic,” but that it has nothing to do with Pauline Kael.

Tarantino went on to add that he just recently completed the screenplay and that the story is set in 1977. Also, the main character is not a movie critic, according to him. He’s aiming for a fall shoot in Los Angeles.

The event took place at the Grand Rex theater in Paris. No cellphones were allowed in the room, so I doubt any video footage will emerge. Frémaux being Frémaux, he couldn’t resist telling Tarantino to bring “The Movie Critic” to Cannes 2025.

Source: World of Reel

Here’s some predictable news. Samuel L Jackson has been cast in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Movie Critic,” according to insider Daniel Richtman.

This would be Jackson’s seventh collaboration with Tarantino and, as we all know by now, it’s the filmmaker’s 10th and final film. Production is/was supposed to start in late September, but, due to the strike, there could certainly be a delay.

Why is this predictable news? Because just yesterday, when interviewed by Vulture, Jackson refused to comment on whether he’s in Tarantino’s next film.

Source: WoR

At least one blockbuster project headlines the titles selected to receive tax credits to shoot in California.

The state’s film office on Friday said that California’s Film & TV tax credit program will welcome a trio of feature films, including Quentin Tarantino’s The Movie Critic, as well as a roster of 13 independent films. (No studio is currently attached to The Movie Critic yet.)

Netflix ($20 million) is the only major studio nabbing credits in this allotment for an untitled film. Lionsgate ($21.1 million) led the way in the previous round of incentives and Netflix and Warner Bros. in the previous four before that.

Tarantino’s final project, listed as “#10” in a nod to his 10th and final movie and produced through L. Driver Productions ($20.2 million), tops the list for the three feature titles that were conditionally granted incentives. The film revolves around a cynical movie critic, whom Tarantino read growing up, and is set in 1977 Southern California. The production is projected to generate more in-state spending than any other movie in the film office’s 14-year history, with $128.4 million in qualified spending. The figure eclipses the record set by Lionsgate’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael ($120.1 million), which was selected to receive credits in March.

“I love shooting in California,” Tarantino said in a statement. “I started directing movies here and it is only fitting that I shoot my final motion picture in the cinema capital of the world.”

The director added, “There is nothing like shooting in my hometown; the crews are the best I’ve ever worked with, and the locations are amazing.”

Restless Productions, Inc. was also granted $20.7 million in credits for Under My Skin, a Frank Sinatra biopic.

Combined, the three big-budget movies will generate an estimated $362 million in qualified spending and $540 million in total production spending in California. They mark a record for the state’s film and TV tax incentive program in terms of spending generated by large studio projects in a single round of tax credits, passing the record set in the last film allocation round announced in March 2023.

In total, the 16 projects selected to receive a total of $77.8 million in tax credits this round are on track to bring $670 million in total production spending, including roughly $466 million in qualified expenditures. (Defined as wages to below-the-line workers and payments to in-state vendors.) They will also employ an estimated 2,422 crew, 851 cast and 23,427 actors and stand-ins, shooting in the state for the entirety of production.

“While production is now drastically reduced, today’s news about projects in our tax credit program signals there will be a much-welcome surge in California-based production once the strikes are resolved,” said California Film Commission Executive Director Colleen Bell.

California designates $330 million annually in credits to shoot in the state. Legislators passed in June a bill that makes the incentives refundable, meaning companies could receive a refund for a portion of their credits that exceed their tax liability. Only Disney and NBCUniversal had tax liabilities in California to take full advantage of the program. Most other states have similar schemes.

Given the dual work stoppage that has essentially brought production to a halt, projects are expected to invoke the tax credit program’s force majeure provision, which pauses the 180-day start date requirement for principal photography. Credits will not be distributed until production is completed and all wages and expenses have been paid.

Of the 13 independent films selected to participate in the tax incentive program, which will generate a combined $104 million in qualified spending, ten have budgets of less than $10 million. They include four projects from parent company Faith Media ($3.8 million): Agent Plus, Boys Club, International Gangster and Quadir’s Redemption.

“I’m a resident of California and it brings me great joy to work with locals and to take advantage of all the amazing things the state has to offer,” said Faith Media president Yolanda Halley in a statement.

The California Film Commission received a total of 55 applications during this round of credits for feature films. The next application periods for features and TV projects will be from Jan. 8-15 and Sept. 4-13 respectively.

EXCLUSIVE: Quentin Tarantino will be reuniting for the third time with Brad Pitt in the director’s final film The Movie Critic. Unclear if Pitt will play the title character, but I think he is. Last time out, Pitt won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and he also starred for Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds. I also think Sony Pictures will be back as the studio distributing the film, with Stacey Sher producing and a 2025 release eyed.

Tarantino has been circumspect on the last movie, but he opened up a bit to Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye at Cannes in May, when the filmmaker presided over a screening of Rolling Thunder. He said at the time the movie was set in California the year of that film’s release, which was 1977, and that it “is based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.”

The inspiration goes back to a job Tarantino had as a teen, loading porn magazines into a vending machine and emptying quarters out of the cash 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 Bamigboye. There was one critic in particular Tarantino liked, who wrote snarky and smart as the second-string critic.

I’d heard Tarantino did quite a bit of rewriting since then, so we’ll see. I read his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novelization, and it fleshed out the story of Pitt’s character Cliff Booth, who, it turned out, was as much a cinema fan as he was a stone killer when the stuntman work dried up. If Booth went from stuntman to film critic, that would make a lot of hardcore fans happy; like many of Tarantino’s screen creations, he’s too good a character to let go of.

The pieces are still falling in place on the film, including where it will be distributed. But after the bang-up job Sony did on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, including forgoing distribution in China and supporting Tarantino’s refusal to excise the Bruce Lee bout with Cliff Booth, it isn’t too much to imagine Tarantino stays in the fold. Stay tuned.

Rusty wrote:Bring back Tim Roth!

WyldeMan wrote:There is an INSANE rumor all over the trades today that The Movie Critic who was supposed to be played by recent Emmy Winner Paul Walter Hauser before the strike but because that fell through, the leading role has now been replaced by the painfully unfunny dip shit "comedian" Shane Gillis!!!

But that cannot be possible. QT would NOT do this to us. He just wouldn't. This is not real life...

EXCLUSIVE: Quentin Tarantino’s movies are always full of surprises, and here is one about The Movie Critic we did not expect. Deadline can reveal that Tarantino has dropped the film as his 10th and final project. He simply changed his mind, Deadline has been told.

Tarantino was going to have Brad Pitt as the principal star, which would have marked their third teaming after Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There were rumors that many from the casts of his past films might take part, and Sony was preparing to make the film after doing such a superb job on the last one.

Word is that Tarantino had rewritten his script, which delayed the start of production. But this is his 10th and final film, and Tarantino simply decided The Movie Critic will not be it.

This is the biggest surprise to Tarantino fans since years back when Deadline revealed he had shelved The Hateful Eight after he gave a small group of actors his script and one of them shared it with their rep. Soon it had been copied and the rough draft was shared all over town and online. Tarantino felt betrayed, but he eventually returned to the project after staging a reading for charity and drawing raves for it.

As for The Movie Critic, originally planned to be his 10th and final film, Tarantino has simply had a change of heart and Deadline hears he will not be moving forward with the project. Sources close to the director said he changed his mind and is going back to the drawing board to figure out what that final movie will be.

The Movie Critic project gained a lot of momentum after the SAG-AFTRA strike ended when Deadline broke that Pitt would be joining the film, with the hope to start shooting it in 2024. Tarantino opened up a bit to Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye at Cannes in May, when the filmmaker presided over a screening of Rolling Thunder. He said at the time his movie was set in California the year of that film’s release, which was 1977, and that it “is based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.”

The inspiration goes back to a job Tarantino had as a teen, loading porn magazines into a vending machine and emptying quarters out of the cash 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 Bamigboye. There was one critic in particular Tarantino liked, who wrote snarky and smart as the second-string critic.

Like with shelving The Hateful Eight, Tarantino has pivoted when he finds it necessary, a trait that has served him well in his career and is sure to help on whatever he does decide to do as his final film.

We will update the story when there is more to reveal.

Source: Deadline

WyldeMan wrote:I gotta be honest, I'm not mad about this. The fact that the FINAL film of QT's was going to be about a movie critic didn't exactly excite me. I want him to return to his roots and go out in true Tarantino style.

Rusty wrote:

WyldeMan wrote:I gotta be honest, I'm not mad about this. The fact that the FINAL film of QT's was going to be about a movie critic didn't exactly excite me. I want him to return to his roots and go out in true Tarantino style.

Exactly how I feel. I just hope he doesn't decide to not do another film at all.

“I trust myself as a writer, I trust my process,” Quentin Tarantino declared onstage at the Adobe Max creative conference in 2016. “I never try to take anything out too soon. If I do, I realize it, and I put it back.” The acclaimed filmmaker added: “Not every film needs to be made. Not every movie should be made.”

And one of those movies that will not be made — as the world learned April 17 — is The Movie Critic, which was billed as Tarantino’s 10th and final film. The project initially focused on a writer working for a fictional porn magazine in the late 1970s and then it quietly evolved, amid a flurry of rewrites, into something resembling a spinoff of his ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (with some potential meta twists, as we’ll explain later).

The decision came as quite a shock given the project was expected to film at least one sequence this year, and then go into full production in early 2025 with an A-list talent attached (Brad Pitt, reteaming with Tarantino for a third time). “I don’t recall him rewriting so much and pushing a start date once he had a movie in mind,” says one agency partner.

A studio was never officially announced, but two sources close to the now-scuttled project tell The Hollywood Reporter that Sony Pictures was firmly on board after ushering 2019’s Once Upon a Time to blockbuster status. That film grossed $377.4 million globally to rank as the writer-director’s biggest movie behind Django Unchained ($425.4 million). Tarantino felt like he found a new compatriot in Sony studio chief Tom Rothman after having made nearly all his previous films with Harvey Weinstein. Sources say the mood on the Sony lot isn’t one of disappointment, however.

Those who know Tarantino (who had no comment for this story) aren’t saying precisely why he shelved the film, only that he had grown more excited by other ideas. “He has a lot of scripts that he’s thrown away,” says one longtime talent representative familiar with Tarantino’s thinking. The filmmaker had also previously emphasized that he liked the idea of “going out on top,” which perhaps added legacy-preserving pressure to his selection of a final film. Tarantino and Sony still have every intention of partnering on whichever project the filmmaker makes instead. “He is a pure artist,” says a source close to the filmmaker, who noted his nine movies have all been original stories in an era rife with familiar IP franchises (with one caveat — Jackie Brown was adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel).

Tarantino originally confirmed his intention to make The Movie Critic last year, saying it was “based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.” While that character-study description hardly sounded as grabby as the ideas behind some of his fan-favorite titles such as the Kill Bill films and Pulp Fiction, few doubted the result would be anything less than an event picture. With the casting of Pitt to reprise his laconic-cool stuntman character Cliff Booth, The Movie Critic may have morphed into something more akin to his novelization of Once Upon, which had a lot more of Booth’s story than was seen in the movie (Tarantino reportedly spent five years writing Once Upon as a novel before deciding to make it as a movie — again showing that he can pivot deep into a process).

The film’s exact story details are not known, but sources familiar with the project dropped a couple intriguing ideas to THR that Tarantino was toying with. One was that the Hollywood-set tale could serve as a Tarantino goodbye meta-verse with the director’s earlier movies existing in the same era of The Movie Critic (which could work, given that his films have a ’70s vibe). That way, Tarantino could bring back some of the stars of his earlier work to reprise their iconic characters in “movie within a movie” moments, or to play fictional versions of themselves as the actors who played those characters. Another idea was that the film could include a movie theater where some characters could potentially interact with a budding future auteur — such as a 16-year-old Tarantino, who worked as an usher at a Torrence porn theater (“I was tall enough to get away with it,” Tarantino once explained).

In recent months, the production has been — as Jules Winnfield might put it — beset on all sides by the tyrannies of casting rumors. At one point, The Movie Critic was going to shoot a short sequence in February with actor-wrestler Paul Walter Hauser, but a source close to the actor says “he was never involved.” There were also reports that previous Tarantino stars John Travolta, Jamie Foxx and Margot Robbie were going to take part in his cinematic farewell. There was even speculation that Tom Cruise would be in the film. Cruise, in Tarantino lore, was first eyed for Pitt’s Once Upon a Time role, but scheduling forced him to bow out. Fans were shipping a Cruise-Tarantino pairing, but The Movie Critic wasn’t actually going to bring them together. According to sources, Cruise hadn’t even met with the filmmaker for a role.

One person who did meet with Tarantino, however, was actress Olivia Wilde. Wilde is said to have sat with Tarantino this year, though it’s not clear if that was for a role or just a general meeting. A source did point to a character in one draft of the script based on legendary film critic Pauline Kael.  

Another actor who might have been closing in on a role was David Krumholtz, last seen in Oppenheimer. Sources said Krumholtz was being eyed, though it’s unclear for what role.

Behind the scenes, Tarantino was surrounding himself with familiar collaborators. Producing the project was Stacey Sher, who produced The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained. And Victoria Thomas, who served as the casting director for the filmmaker’s Once Upon a Time, Hateful Eight and Django Unchained, was in the process of coming on board and is said to have been making some initial outreach to actors when the effort went belly up.

One party definitely caught off guard: the California Film Commission, which last year conditionally granted Tarantino’s production banner L. Driver Productions more than $20 million to film in the state. As far as the commission is concerned, the movie is still an “active project” in its tax incentive program, notes a person familiar with the situation, who adds that a representative for Tarantino was in contact with the commission as recently as mid-April. The person said, “We’ve not been notified by them about dropping or pulling out or anything.”

The question now becomes: What next? Tarantino has been talking about retirement since as far back as 2009, when he said he wanted to quit directing films before he was 60 (the filmmaker turned 61 in March). He’s been talking about ending with 10 films since at least 2014. Some of his previously considered yet unmade projects include an R-rated Star Trek movie, a Kill Bill: Vol 3, and a Django and Zorro team-up. Whatever his eventual choice of project, the 10th-and-final designation will surely result in an unprecedented amount of fan and media anticipation for the film, which perhaps only adds to Tarantino’s self-generated burden to get his last one right.

During that same creative conference eight years ago, Tarantino was excited about his 10-film plan and ending his directorial career with such an exclusive and enviable oeuvre (“Drop the mic, boom!” he exclaimed. “Tell everybody: ‘Match that shit!'”). He also mentioned a unique project he was toying with. “I’m working on a film critic project about the year in cinema 1970, especially in development of new Hollywood,” Tarantino said. “Am I doing it as a book? Am I doing it as a documentary? … I’m trying to figure out what to do with it.”

Winston Cho contributed to this report.

A version of this story first appeared in the April 24 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.