Quentin Tarantino has been thinking about his final movie for over a decade.
“I want to stop at a certain point,” the two-time Oscar winner told Playboy in 2012. “Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film f*cks up three good ones.” In another interview from 2019, Tarantino compared his filmography to a train. “If you think about the idea of all the movies telling one story, and each film is like a train boxcar connected to each other, this one would sort of be the big show-stopping climax of it all. And I could imagine that the 10th one would be a little more epilogue-y,” he said.
After a brief infatuation with Star Trek, Tarantino has settled on his “big show-stopping climax”: The Movie Critic. Let’s hope it’s more Eyes Wide Shut than Buddy Buddy (minus the whole, um, dying thing).
Here’s everything we know about The Movie Critic.
Plot
The Movie Critic is based on, as Tarantino put it, “a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.” The film will be set in California in 1977, the year of Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Saturday Night Fever. It was inspired by the director’s teenage job of loading pornography magazines into a vending machine. “All the other stuff was too skanky to read but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” he explained to Deadline. Tarantino refused to name the magazine, but the critic “wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle might be if he were a film critic.”
Tarantino praised the anonymous critic for being “very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny. He was as rude as hell.” Somewhere in there, he’ll find the plot (but it won’t be about renowned New Yorker critic Pauline Kael).
Cast
No cast has been announced yet, but Tarantino has said his leading man will be “somebody in the 35 year-old ball park. It’ll definitely be a new leading man for me.” That rules out Django and Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio (maybe Cobra Kai favorite Paul Walter Hauser?), but there’s rumors that John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson might make a Pulp Fiction reunion.
Release Date
Tarantino hoped to start filming in fall 2023, but that was before the SAG-AFTRA strike. It’s unclear when production will begin, so don’t expect The Movie Critic to come out before 2025 (a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where Pulp Fiction won the prestigious Palme d’Or, is likely), at the earliest.
Trailer
There’s no trailer. Instead, please enjoy Tarantino on The Golden Girls.