Late last week, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino shocked the film industry. All set to start shooting his tenth and would-be final film, “The Movie Critic,” or at least a handful of scenes to be eligible for a tax credit and then resume in 2025, the filmmaker pivoted, changed course, and then canceled the film.
While some details leaked in the aftermath, the film apparently morphed into a “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” spin-off featuring Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth stuntman character, thanks to Tarantino’s endless rewriting, a new in-depth piece on the cancelation of the film by the Hollywood Reporter is separating some of the facts from the fictions.
The top-level highlight may be that previous rumors claiming Tom Cruise could have a part were considered incorrect. According to THR’s sources, Cruise hadn’t even met with the filmmaker for a role. Rumors that actor Paul Walter Hauser was going to be involved proved to be false, too. Some reports suggested that John Travolta, Jamie Foxx, and Margot Robbie were going to be involved, but none bore any merit evidently.
But two new names have surfaced that could have been involved if it went forward. Tarantino apparently had met with writer/director actress Olivia Wilde and sat for a year hoping for a role to materialize. One draft of the script had a character based on legendary film critic Pauline Kael, and while Wilde isn’t explicitly named as vying for that part, it’s somewhat suggested in the piece.
Another name in connection to the film was comedian David Krumholtz, who had recently appeared in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” Krumholtz was apparently being eyed for a role, but the exact part is unknown.
“The Movie Critic” began as a film centered on a movie writer working for a fictional porn magazine in the late 1970s, but due to a “flurry of rewrites,” kept evolving, at one point transforming into something that resembled a spin-off of his ninth film, the aforementioned “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
While no studio was formally attached, all signs point to Sony Pictures, who distributed ‘Hollywood,’ once again producing the picture had it been made. The understanding seems to be that whenever Tarantino ultimately decides what his tenth movie will be, Tom Rothman’s Sony will likely make it, which isn’t much of a surprise at this point.
While no one seems to know precisely why Tarantino shelved the movie, the reasons seemed to be self-imposed pressures to deliver a film worthy of the “final Quentin Tarantino picture,” creative jags of many ideas coming fast and furious, and that he may have gotten excited about different projects. (“He has a lot of scripts that he’s thrown away,” one source is quoted as saying).
READ MORE: The Lost, Unmade & Possible Future Films Of Quentin Tarantino
Some of the ideas Tarantino was toying with were apparently meta-esque (and arguably far too navel-gazing). Here’s a good THR graph of context:
The film’s exact story details are not known, but sources familiar with the project dropped a couple of 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).
What exactly is next for Tarantino is nothing but pure speculation. The most recent projects Tarantino played with before giving up on “The Movie Critic” were an R-rated version of “Star Trek” that was scrapped and a “Bounty Law” spin-off TV series from “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” that never materialized. Tarantino has a penchant for getting fans excited for spin-offs or sequels that have never come to pass, like “Kill Bill 3” or “The Vega Brothers,” but it’s doubtful that those films will ever come to pass at this point.