Quentin Tarantino On Why He “Pulled The Plug” On ‘The Movie Critic’

After Deadline reported last year that Quentin Tarantino dropped The Movie Critic as his 10th and final film, he’s providing some insight to the decision.

The 2x Oscar winner recently explained that although he “was very happy” with what he wrote originally as an eight-part series and then translated into a feature-length script but “wasn’t really that excited” when it came time for pre-production.

“No one’s waiting for this thing per se. I mean, I can do it whenever I want. I mean, it’s already written. So OK, let me just not start it right now,” he explained his thought process on The Church of Tarantino podcast. “Let me try writing it as a movie and let me see if it’s better that way. And I was like, ‘Oh, OK, no, I think this is going to be the movie.’ And then it wasn’t. I pulled the plug on it. And the reason I pulled the plug, it’s a little crazy.”

Although Tarantino said he “really, really likes” The Movie Critic, he noted, “But there was a challenge that I gave to myself when I did it. Can I take the most boring profession in the world and make it an interesting movie?”

“Every Tarantino title promises so much, except The Movie Critic,” he explained. “Who wants to see a TV show about a f***ing movie critic? Who wants to see a movie called The Movie Critic? If I can actually make a movie or a TV show about somebody who watches movies interesting, that is an accomplishment.

“It’s a spiritual sequel to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood in so far as they take place in the same world and they take place in the same town. But there were no crossover characters. Cliff Booth was never in The Movie Critic. That’s all a bunch of bull****. That never was the case ever, ever, ever.”

Tarantino added, “I was so excited about the writing, but I wasn’t really that excited about dramatizing what I wrote once we were in pre-production.”

After The Movie Critic was teased as Tarantino’s farewell film in 2023, with Brad Pitt attached to star, Deadline exclusively reported last April that the auteur simply had a change of heart and opted not to move forward with the project. Sources close to the director said he was going back to the drawing board to figure out what that final movie will be.

Tarantino said the movie was set in 1977 California, “based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.”

Although a spiritual sequel to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) isn’t in the cards for Tarantino’s final directorial outing, Pitt is reprising his role as stuntman Cliff Booth for the upcoming Netflix movie off-shoot The Adventures of Cliff Booth, directed by David Fincher.