Well, here’s some exciting casting. Brad Pitt is teaming up with Quentin Tarantino for Tarantino’s tenth and final movie—so he claims anyhow—“The Movie Critic.” It’s unclear if Pitt has the title lead role, but Deadline, who breaks the news, says he probably does, and this makes sense. While Tarantino was initially looking for a white male in his 30s, aging up the character a little bit won’t hurt, and Pitt obviously can still pass for his 40s. Plus, it’s Brad Pitt; he’s likely not just going to star in Tarantino’s last movie in a more minor supporting role, now is he?
This would be the third team-up between Tarantino and Pitt. The actor appeared in one of the major roles in the filmmaker’s 2009 ensemble film, “Inglourious Basterds,” and shared the leading role with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2019’s “Upon A Time…In Hollywood.” But if Pitt is playing the title role, it would be his first proper lead in a Tarantino movie, with no arguments to be had about it.
Once thought to be about the famous movie critic Pauline Kael, “The Movie Critic” is based on a movie reviewer who wrote for a pornographic magazine in the 1970s.
“All the other stuff was too skanky to read, but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page. He wrote about mainstream movies, and he was the second-string critic,” Tarantino said last year. “I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle [Robert DeNiro’s character in “Taxi Driver”] might be if he were a film critic.”
It’s already presumed that “The Movie Critic” is based on little-known film critic and porn historian William Mangold, a writer that Tarantino mentioned on his Video Archives podcast almost at the very beginning of its inception.
Filmmaker Paul Schrader recently revealed that Tarantino would be up to his revisionist history tricks again, as he has with most of his films since “Inglourious Basterds,” only this time he’ll be rewriting movie history.
“Quentin will insert extracts from films from the 1970s. And he will also make his own versions of films from that era,” Schrader revealed late last year. “He asked my permission to shoot the ending of [‘Rolling Thunder’], by John Flynn, as I had written it in the original screenplay—before it was completely rewritten and watered down.”
Presumably, that means Pitt’s reviewer character will be reviewing “Rolling Thunder” in the film, but perhaps the version he will be watching was actually never shot in real life but was the way it was intended and the way Schrader originally envisioned it (Tarantino is a huge “Rolling Thunder” fan).
Tarantino never fessed up to details but seemingly confirmed most of what we already know, saying the film “is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.” Sony Pictures will likely produce the movie and is eyeing a 2025 release. [Deadline]