Almost a year after he began teasing his 10th and (allegedly) last film, Quentin Tarantino has reportedly scrapped The Movie Critic altogether.
First announced in 2023, The Movie Critic was set in the ’70s and centered on a film critic inspired by a real-life writer who published reviews in porn magazines that Tarantino read when he was younger. According to a new report from THR, Tarantino’s script “morphed along the way into a film that would feature Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, the stuntman he portrayed in an Oscar-winning performance in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Whether Booth would become the eponymous movie critic or cross paths with the character, and whether the film would be set before or after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood doesn’t matter because Tarantino has apparently decided not to make The Movie Critic after all.
(THR also blew up Tarantino’s spot, noting he planned to film for one day this summer in order to qualify for over $20 million in California tax credit before actually heading into production next year. And? Was the movie expected to pay for itself? This sort of creative scheduling is legal and fairly common.)
Tarantino scrapping the project seems rather sudden, and while it’s likely that he just decided it wasn’t working for whatever reason, there is some speculating that Brad Pitt had something to do with it. Pitt is still embroiled in a protracted legal dispute with his former wife, Angelina Jolie, over a shared vineyard and winery in France. Jolie recently accused Pitt of refusing to let her sell her shares of the business unless she signed a “more onerous” and “expansive” NDA, and according to a statement from her lawyers, Pitt’s alleged physical assault of their child in 2016 was an escalation in an ongoing pattern of abuse. “While Pitt’s history of physical abuse of Jolie started well before the family’s September 2016 plane trip from France to Los Angeles,” Jolie’s lawyers said, “this flight marked the first time he turned his physical abuse on the children as well. Jolie then immediately left him.”
Just two days ago, InTouch published a rumor alleging that Jolie has recordings of multiple altercations with Pitt. That said, it’s hard to imagine Tarantino getting spooked out of making another movie with Pitt based on tabloid stories, especially since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was filmed after the allegations regarding the plane incident were made public.
(featured image: Toni Anne Barson, FilmMagic)
