This really sounds like an April Fool’s Day joke. But every trade in Hollywood is reporting that it’s legit.
As first reported in The Playlist, the script that Quentin Tarantino almost turned into his tenth (and, if he sticks to his long-standing pledge to retire after ten films, final) directorial effort called The Movie Critic has fallen into the hands of David Fincher. Now Fincher is planning to direct Tarantino’s script.
According to Deadline, it was actually Brad Pitt who “got Tarantino’s blessing to show” the script to his Se7en, Fight Club, and Curious Case of Benjamin Button director. Pitt’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood character, stuntman Cliff Booth, is reportedly a key character in the movie, and Pitt had previously agreed to return for the film when Tarantino was originally going to direct it. (The project was called off in the spring of last year.)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
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By some accounts, this all started when Tarantino wrote a script called The Movie Critic about a film writer at a seedy Los Angeles magazine in the 1970s, with Pitt set to play Cliff Booth again in a supporting role. That would have made it a sort of sequel to Tarantino’s 2019 movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where Pitt played Booth opposite Leonardo DiCaprio as fading TV star Rick Dalton. Then there were reports that after Pitt agreed to return for The Movie Critic, Tarantino’s concepts “morphed into something more akin to [Tarantino’s] novelization of Once Upon, which had a lot more of Booth’s story than was seen in the movie.”
The Playlist claims the version that Fincher is now in line to direct “sounds very much like a Cliff Booth film though most plot details are unknown.” Whether the movie critic angle has been dropped completely is not clear. (Deadline claims the title “likely corresponded to the fact that Booth’s passion for movie watching was explored in detail,” so who knows whether the critic aspect was ever actually a big part of it.)
Either way, multiple reports say that Fincher wants to direct Pitt as Booth in this Tarantino script, and that Netflix is funding the project and would distribute it. The Playlist even claims that the movie could wind up being shot in California this summer. I just hope the whole thing is really not an April Fool’s Day joke.
