Quentin Tarantino cancels new movie about film critic for porn magazine

‘The Film Critic’ is no longer in development. Quentin Tarantino’s tenth and presumably last film, for which Brad Pitt had already signed on, has been canceled. This was announced by The Hollywood Reporter on its website, without further explanation.

According to the publication, Tarantino’s team had booked a day in August to shoot in Los Angeles in order to secure a grant of more than $20 million from the state of California, after which they hoped to continue production in early 2025. However, all plans have been canceled and the director has decided to scrap the project and start over, just as he did with the ‘Star Trek’ horror movie he was considering at the time.

What was Tarantino’s last movie about?

‘The Film Critic’ was supposed to be a kind of spiritual sequel to ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’. Set in California in 1977, the movie was “based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.” Brad Pitt would have reprised his role as stuntman Cliff Booth and Tom Cruise was also in talks for a role.

Tarantino wanted to say goodbye to the movies by recalling his own experience as a teenager when he fell in love with the seventh art and worked stuffing porn magazines out of a vending machine, which he also emptied of coins. “All the other stuff was too skanky to read, but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” Tarantino told a Deadline reporter. “There was one critic in particular Tarantino liked, who wrote snarky and smart as the second-string critic.”

Why will Tarantino retire after 10 movies?

The idea that Tarantino will retire after his tenth film has always plagued his fans, but it is the director himself who is the architect and great promoter of it. In a 2012 interview for Playboy magazine, the filmmaker noted that he wanted 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 When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty.”

The director has insisted on this for a long time, but for some time now he has made it clear that even if he leaves the cinema, he will continue to tell stories. In 2021, for example, he published his first book and has shown interest in making a series. There’s still Tarantino for a while.