Quentin Tarantino's Scrapped THE MOVIE CRITIC Involved a "Goodbye Meta-Verse" With Characters From His Films

ILLUSTRATION BY LÆMEUR via THR

Last week, director Quentin Tarantino made the surprise announcement that his anticipated, previously announced 10th and final film, The Movie Critic, would no longer be moving forward.

Sources say that the filmmaker is still looking to make a 10th film, as planned, but it won’t be the one he previously told fans about. The film had already cast Brad Pitt in the lead role, and Tom Cruise was rumored to be in talks to join the picture as well.

Tarantino previously said this film would be set in California in 1977, and that it was “based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.”

The inspiration went back to a job Tarantino had as a teen, loading porn magazines into a vending machine and emptying quarters out of the cash dispenser.

Now we have even more insight into what that movie could have been, thanks to a profile by The Hollywood Reporter. The article says that sources familiar with the project revealed a couple of intriguing ideas 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 as 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 sounded inspired by Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans, and would have seen scenes inside 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 Torrance, CA. porn theater (“I was tall enough to get away with it,” Tarantino once explained).

In recent months, the production has been — as Jules Winnfield might put it — beset on all sides by the tyrannies of casting rumors. At one point, The Movie Critic was going to shoot a short sequence in February with actor-wrestler Paul Walter Hauser, but a source close to the actor says “he was never involved.”

There were also reports that previous Tarantino stars John Travolta, Jamie Foxx and Margot Robbie were going to take part in his cinematic farewell. There was even speculation that Tom Cruise would be in the film. Cruise, in Tarantino lore, was first eyed for Pitt’s Once Upon a Time role, but scheduling forced him to bow out.

Fans were shipping a Cruise-Tarantino pairing, but The Movie Critic wasn’t actually going to bring them together. According to sources, Cruise hadn’t even met with the filmmaker for a role. 

One person who did meet with Tarantino, however, was actress Olivia Wilde. Wilde is said to have sat with Tarantino this year, though it’s not clear if that was for a role or just a general meeting. A source did point to a character in one draft of the script based on legendary film critic Pauline Kael.  

Another actor who might have been closing in on a role was David Krumholtz, last seen in Oppenheimer. Sources said Krumholtz was being eyed, though it’s unclear for what role.

Behind the scenes, Tarantino was surrounding himself with familiar collaborators. Producing the project was Stacey Sher, who produced The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained. And Victoria Thomas, who served as the casting director for the filmmaker’s Once Upon a Time, Hateful Eight and Django Unchained, was in the process of coming on board and is said to have been making some initial outreach to actors when the effort went belly up.

It’s kind of sad hearing all the “what ifs” for this movie, and knowing that this movie could have been an intersection to Tarantino’s films, and a tribute to the budding filmmaker as he came of age.

This sounds like the perfect movie for a fan of his films to watch! But I trust that he will come up with something brilliant, and we will end up with a great final film.