Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Movie Critic’: What would it have been like?

Last week, Quentin Tarantino shocked the entertainment industry by ashcanning what was to have been his 10th (and, so he reminds us, final) film, “The Movie Critic.” The two-time Oscar-winner and highly influential auteur has yet to publicly comment on why this has all gone down, but the snoops at The Hollywood Reporter have dug up some details. 

For starters, there’s ample evidence of Tarantino developing something and then pulling the plug in the past. You can look at the Wikipedia entry for the man’s unrealized projects and do a whole lot of imagining. It’s just rare that something gets this far along in the process—production was due to start at the end of this year, and a tax deal had already been set up with the California Film Commission. Although no distributor was officially on board, there was an understanding that Tarantino would work again with Sony, after the successful collaboration on “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” (Prior to that 2019 hit, Tarantino had always worked with Miramax or The Weinstein Company.) 

The common belief is that Tarantino simply had mission creep on the project. It began, so he said, as a look at a movie reviewer for a porno mag in the 1970s—based, so he said, on someone real, but not too famous. (His prose style is said to be a mix of Howard Stern and Travis Bickle.)

Over time, though, Tarantino wrote more and more about the character Cliff Booth—the Oscar-winning part played by Brad Pitt in “Once Upon”—until it started to become a sequel to the earlier film. Things got stranger as characters from Tarantino’s earlier movies were said to enter the story.

Well, here’s where it gets sketchy. Either the drafts included characters, or it included the actors who played those roles playing themselves, but aware that they would play those roles. Some names floated include Jamie Foxx, John Travolta, and Margot Robbie.

Another rumor is that much of the film was going to be set at a movie theater, where an actor would play a stand-in for the young Tarantino. Indeed, the “Pulp Fiction” director did work at a porno theater at the age of 16 (!) in Torrance, California. It was there where he first encountered whatever mysterious rag included reviews of mainstream movies by this unnamed scribe. 

Casting rumors had been circling around the project for quite some time. Paul Walter Hauser was said to be playing the lead…though he and his camp denied it. There was also talk of Tom Cruise joining in. It was believed that Cruise was initially going to play Booth before Pitt got the gig, so the idea of the two in the same film led to more potential meta-stories. 

The only two actors known to have taken a meeting on the project were David Krumholtz, hot off of “Oppenheimer,” and Olivia Wilde, who THR suggests may have been in the running to play Pauline Kael.

As for what Tarantino does next … who knows? Keep in mind he once said he was scrapping “The Hateful Eight” after the script leaked, so maybe there’s still life in “The Movie Critic” yet. Or maybe he’ll do his “Star Trek” project, the one allegedly set as a sequel to the Original Series episode “A Piece of the Action,” but R-rated. Or maybe he’ll just write more books. “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” began as a novel, actually. So maybe the sequel will still come out in some way. 

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