Quentin Tarantino cancels The Movie Critic

It’s been 13 months since Quentin Tarantino set The Movie Critic in stone as his tenth and final film, and now he’s walking back those plans.

The Hollywood Reporter has the details on the renowned filmmaker moving away from the long-anticipated project, but it’s unclear why exactly he’s had such a radical change of heart this late into the process.

Before The Movie Critic, there was a Star Trek idea Tarantino had been kicking around for a while, in hopes of turning it into a film, but that didn’t come to fruition either. He’s spent more than a few years now saying he wants to “go out on the top of his game,” a reasoning that’s been confusing to say the least, given his love for the medium and the fact most legendary directors never really walk away from making films. Hell, Ridley Scott (86 years old now) is still putting out a major feature per year on average. “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,” Tarantino told Playboy in 2012.

Following his reasoning (and assuming he’s still committed to the ‘ten and done’ idea), however, we can see why he’s being extra careful with the big finale of his film career. Is he perhaps unearthing Kill Bill Vol. 3 again? Too soon to say. It’s hard not to think about his tentative TV plans as well, which may become another immediate option and could put some space between him and that final film.

Even more head-scratching are the reports that The Movie Critic would’ve featured Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth, the charismatic stuntman character from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2018), who led the film alongside Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, raising the additional question of whether the film would’ve been a prequel/sequel of sorts to Tarantino’s previous one.

Light speculation aside, it’s hard to discern where the off-beat filmmaker might go from here, but knowing him, expect the unexpected.