Quentin Tarantino has maintained for years that he would make ten films and ten films only and then retire as a director (at least as a director of movies; he’s left the door open for directing theater, or maybe even making television shows). He’s now made nine movies which. means if he sticks to his word, he’s only got one more film left in his career — ever.
It has previously been revealed that Tarantino was looking at making the tenth movie something he wrote called The Movie Critic, which would have been about the life of an anonymous film reviewer living in 1970s L.A. (supposedly based on a real-life person Tarantino used to read as a kid). But now it looks like the film is off, and the subject of Tarantino’s final film is back up in the air.
That’s the word from Deadline, who writes that Tarantino “is going back to the drawing board to figure out what that final movie will be.” They quote anonymous sources who say that Tarantino “simply had a change of heart” about the project after rewriting the script.
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This is at least the second “final” Tarantino project we know about that he flirted with and then dropped. For years, he was working on a Star Trek movie he would have directed; after a lengthy development process, he decided not to pursue the film. Paramount still hasn’t made a new Star Trek movie since then.
Tarantino has reversed himself before; he almost didn’t make The Hateful Eight after the script for the project leaked. The whole film almost fell through, but then Tarantino had another of his changes of heart and did make the movie after all. So he might decide a few months down the road to make The Movie Critic after all — or to turn the script into a TV show or a novel (Tarantino has already released one book of film criticism and a novelization of his script for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood).
Either way, it’s already been five years since Tarantino’s most recent movie. The fans are waiting and the clock is ticking.
