Quentin Tarantino on Why He Isn’t Making The Movie Critic & if Cliff Booth Was in the Script

Quentin Tarantino is opening up about why he isn’t making The Movie Critic.

Tarantino was originally planning to make The Movie Critic as his tenth and final film; however, in April 2024, it was reported that Tarantino had changed his mind and abandoned the project. Details as to why he decided not to make The Movie Critic weren’t revealed at the time.

What did Quentin Tarantino say about The Movie Critic?

Appearing on an episode of The Church of Tarantino podcast, the Pulp Fiction director said he originally wrote The Movie Critic to be an eight-episode television show.

“I think when I was done [writing the show], and I knew I had done it, and now I was faced with the hard work in front of me of setting it up and doing it, I didn’t really want to do it that much,” Tarantino said. “That’s 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 it made me want to investigate.”

Tarantino said he then rewrote The Movie Critic to be a movie script and that he was “happy” with it.

He clarified that while The Movie Critic could have been a “spiritual sequel” to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there were never any crossover characters and Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth character never showed up.

“That was never the case, ever ever ever,” he said of Cliff Booth being in the movie. “But it is the same town except in 1977 as opposed to 1969. And, frankly, to tell you the truth, it was pre-production that made me realize that I was so excited about the writing, but I wasn’t really that excited about dramatizing what I wrote.”

Tarantino continued to explain that, when approaching his movies, there’s typically a lot of learning involved when it comes to crafting certain sequences — be it turning Los Angeles into 1969 Hollywood without any special effects, burning down the theater in Inglorious Basterds, the Kill Bill Crazy 88 sequence, etc.

“There was nothing to figure out [with The Movie Critic] because I already kind of knew more or less how to turn LA into an older time,” he summarized. “So it just was too much like the last one.”

Source: Comingsoon.net