So’s the power of Quentin Tarantino that an aborted project will carry more weight than most filmmakers’ fussed-over opuses. Though it’s been almost a year since the announcement he would conclude his filmmaking career with The Movie Critic, which would star Brad Pitt––and supposedly feature “many from the casts of his past films”––Deadline has learned some rather thunderous news: the film is being altogether cancelled, Tarantino having “simply changed his mind” and now back to square one for his final film. Almost as fascinating, per THR, is that recent rewrites fashioned it into a Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood spin-off that would’ve found Pitt playing Cliff Booth, a character Tarantino greatly expanded upon in that film’s novelization.
Comparisons to The Hateful Eight‘s cancellation and subsequent resurrection will no doubt be drawn, though its early script leak and less-burdensome status as a point along the career, not its heavily anticipated capstone, make this scenario seem altogether different. Needless to say the hole this leaves in one’s imagination is almost too big to fill, visions of a redone Rolling Thunder dancing through our mind.
Stay tuned for where Tarantino goes next, though at this rate I wouldn’t expect it until 2026 at the earliest.