Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino famously and abruptly canceled his tenth film, “The Movie Critic,” last year in pre-production. After much speculation as to why, the writer/director is finally shedding light on some of the many rumors out there about his deep-sixed movie and, in the process, revealing tons of new details.
On a two-hour podcast conversation with the fan podcast, “The Church Of Tarantino,” Tarantino revealed that “The Movie Critic” began its life as an eight-part TV series that would have starred Brad Pitt (at the time, many people assumed this was “Bounty Law“).
Tarantino explained that the entire affair was finished in June 2022, when he announced at a New York event that he had a mini-series on the way. But then, when he started the process, he realized it was so good that it could be a movie.
“When I was in New York, I had just finished the eighth episode,” he explained. “I had, I had written it, and I was just getting ready to start the process of going around to the different networks and showing them episodes. Because I had them all—it’s not like I only had a pilot, I’ll give them all of them. It’s a long process, and I was just right at the beginning of it—the eight-episode series was ‘The Movie Critic.’”
“After I did the work of writing the eight episodes, I was very happy with it, and I was like, ‘Oh, this has worked out really well. This will, this will be cool.’ I think once I was done…Now I was faced with the hard work in front of me of setting it up, and I didn’t really want to do it that much,” he continued.” “That’s maybe too strong a word to say— but it was more like, ‘If I like this so much, could it be a movie? Is it really a movie?’ And that was just enough of a question that made me want to investigate.”
“’ Let me let me try writing it as a movie and let me see if I let me see if it’s if it’s better that way,’” Tarantino said, walking the interviewer through his own self-reasoning. “It’ll be an interesting experiment, anyway, having written eight episodes of a series and trying to make it into a two-hour movie.”
Tarantino then explained why “The Movie Critic” went away, which you can read about in detail here. But perhaps more interesting was Tarantino’s debunk that “The Movie Critic” morphed into the upcoming “The Adventures Of Cliff Booth,” which David Fincher is about to direct, and that Cliff Booth was also in “The Movie Critic.” In fact, they are distinctly separate stories and films.
“[‘The Movie Critic’] is a spiritual sequel to ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood; insofar as they take place in the same world and they take place in the same town, but there were no crossover characters,” he explained. “Cliff Booth was never in ‘The Movie Critic.’ That’s all a bunch of bullshit. That never was the case ever, ever, ever. It is the same town except set in 1977 as opposed to 1969.”
There you have it, and perhaps reason number one million and one why you shouldn’t take everything the trades say as gospel, clearly they got their wires crossed in the original reporting that claimed Booth part of ‘The Movie Critic’ and that that film morphed into “The Adventures of Cliff Booth” spiritual sequel.
Listen to this excellent full podcast conversation below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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