In a shocking twist of fate, writer/director Quentin Tarantino has decided not to move forward with “The Movie Critic” later this year (Sony Pictures was attached to distribute) as a report from Deadline announces the project has been scrapped entirely and the filmmaker will pivot to something else as his tenth, and final, film. “The Movie Critic” had longtime collaborator Brad Pitt attached to play a role, which the outlet claims would have been a reprisal of Pitt’s charismatic stuntman character Cliff Booth from “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.”

Other plot details were a little murky but would have followed a movie critic in Los Angeles during the 1970s that was writing for a “porno rag” and likely would have invited itself to feature the seedy underbelly of the city. There were also hints from Tarantino it would have homaged things like the violent revenge flick “Rolling Thunder,” and the protagonist was said to be similar to Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver.” The former could have been an entry point for Cliff Booth to get involved, as that film featured two military buddies getting revenge together.

You never know; perhaps Tarantino will turn the script/project into a book instead.

This wouldn’t be the first time Tarantino has gotten cold feet ahead of production on one of his movies. You might remember that he once got so fed up with a leak of an unfinished version of “The Hateful Eight” script during the casting process that he pumped the breaks, and it was only until he did a live stage reading of the script that Tarantino ultimately decided to give the project a second shot.

Meanwhile, there have been plenty of unmade ideas in the past, who knows how far he ever got with these, that simply were spoken about in interviews that never materialized like “The Vega Brothers” movie, a fabled “Kill Bill 3” where Kiddo and Bibbi had to fight off revenge seekers, and there was even a time when Tarantino wanted to do an adaptation of the Len Deighton spy novels “Berlin Game,” “Mexico Set,” and “London Match.“

What comes next for Tarantino is a bit of mystery as a second project wasn’t on deck, and there was an expectation that “The Movie Critic” would be the filmmaker’s final theatrical feature.

SOURCE: DEADLINE