Quentin Tarantino is ready for his curtain call.
The writer/director has finished a screenplay for a movie called “The Movie Critic,” that Tarantino hopes to film this fall, according to reports. This will be his 10th and final movie.
While plot details are being kept under wraps, it is being described as set in Hollywood in the 1970s. Speculation has already begun that the movie will be about Pauline Kael, who took a job as a consultant for Paramount Pictures in the late 1970s at the behest of Warren Beatty. Her tenure only last a few months before she returned to criticism. (After returning to New York from Los Angeles she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease; she retired from criticism in 1991.)
Tarantino has discussed his desire to retire after 10 movies (or when he is 60). He turns 60 this year, so it makes sense that he would be working on his swan song. (Keep in mind this math only works if you count “Kill Bill” as a single movie.) Tarantino has previously described his last movie “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” as his best film (its codename during production was “Magnum Opus”) and one that he has, in the years since, turned into a highly readable novel (it’s seriously great).
The Hollywood Reporter first reported the story.
In summing up his 10th film, he always described it as “epilogue-y,” both in terms of scale and ambition and quite literally – “The Movie Critic” is supposedly set in the 1970s (the decade after “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”). Could it be set in the same universe as “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?” Instead of Warren Beatty, could Pauline Kael (or a Pauline Kael-type character) make her way to Hollywood at the behest of Rick Dalton? That would make it a very real epilogue. And considering Tarantino made a shared universe something cool long before Marvel Studios did it, this is something that is entirely possible.
Among the projects that Tarantino has talked about (and were seemingly in contention for the “final film” slot) – a “Star Trek” project for Paramount, a gangster movie set in the 1930s, an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”-type sci-fi movie told from the perspective of the pod people and “Killer Crow,” a sideways sequel/spin-off to “Inglourious Basterds” that followed a battalion of Black fighters during the same period of World War II.
